Such a great episode! I know the view count is still unfairly low, but when the content is this good you are still making a genuine difference to 100s or 1000s of people’s world views. So thanks for the videos☺️
thank you, i really appreciate that! that would be amazing if people change their thinking because of this stuff. if you’re active in any online communities please share it if appropriate. the only way i have to share it is on reddit, and more and more subs are blocking people from promoting their own videos unless they’re active users and i dont have time to be randomly active online aside from this stuff!
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 what's the source for the "communists ironically dismantled the socialist project, it was better to lose spain to the fascists" part?
@@VocalBear213 basically any history of the revolution - the one i cited for this episode was Dolgoff Anarchist Collectives, or more recently I read Loren 2016, Revolution, Defeat and Theoretical Underdevelopment, there’s a chapter on the revolution you can get for free on libcom - stalin insisted on pushing back the revolution because it was scaring countries like france or england that he wanted to curry favour with, so the spanish stalinists did so as soon as they had the chance. but it’s commonly thought that (and it makes 100% sense to me) that for the USSR the fact that there was actual worker control over industry and agriculture without the party control that existed in the USSR and without the war on peasants that they had there, that this was an existential threat to the whole legitimacy of their rule. stalin wasn’t sayin “we must crush the anarchists, it’s a threat to our power” but it surely must have been part of the motivation in my view, even if unconsciously
As a Hegelian I have to say that I'm in love with your channel even thought I feel like this particular video issue is even more complicated than you've shown. You are nonetheless extremely underrated and I can't figure out why!
I love that the algorithm is now recommending your videos to me by itself without me having to go on your channel to see if you posted some things I missed!
Wow, this was fantastic! I just stumbled upon your channel and am VERY impressed with the quality of your content. You deserve wayyy more views and subscribes, and I hope this comment can help you get more algorithmic love. Keep up the great work!
Regarding the slave revolt in Haiti.......some (including Marcus Garvey Jr.) attribute its success to the fact that a large percentage of the slaves were from the same locale in Africa......and thus could communicate readily with each other. The slave traders' practice after Haiti was to assure that their human "goods" were from different regions, and spoke different languages.
Keep making videos like this, please. Topics such as philosophy, law, history, and politics are often disregarded by most people (unless they major in or currently study said topics), which results in low views as compared to “fun” content, but we need more educational videos. I learned more about politics from you and the books I currently have than from the years I spent at an academic institution.
I’ve only just watched this video. As usual, it was full of information and ideas that were completely new to me - clearly presented. And fun! Thank you!
A fun example of a materialist interpretation of human action is road traffic. At the macroscopic scale, it is traditionally modelled using fluid dynamics equations. This breaks down when there's an accident, for example, not in the lane where the accident has occurred (a blockage is a blockage, after all), but in the other lane(s), especially the one(s) travelling in the opposite direction, because water molecules aren't known for rubbernecking.
@@matt7754 The point was simply that sometimes what seems like a rational actor-type decision at one level of analysis can be modelled as a purely material one at another level (admittedly, using the word "material" there more in the "rational materialist" sense).
Great video as always. I think it's interesting that you brought up the topic of anarchism and the future of industrial civilization but for a completely different reason than I would. Basically, I don't see any other plausible outcome to our current predicament of interconnected environmental, economic and social problems except some sort of a societal collapse, and I think the collapse has already started in a lot of places, such as America. Societal collapse is a process of simplification of a complex society, in our case a decades-long process of some degree of deindustrialization, economic and population decline and a return to a more localized society. For details, I recommend the podcast Breaking Down: Collapse. We have a lot of influence over what the collapse looks like exactly and the best-case scenario is a planned degrowth with some qualitative improvements in our lives. Because of my belief in collapse, I think there's a very good chance that anarchism will become a major political force in the coming decades. I think it's likely that GDP will go into a permanent decline within this decade, and that in these conditions, the only ideologies that thrive are fascism and various forms of socialism. Anarchism is highly compatible with the degrowth movement, and the sort of crises that come with a relatively uncontrolled collapse also provide very good conditions for anarchism.
i don’t have a dogmatic position on the future, but unfortunately you may be right about collapse. and yes it could potentially lead to conditions favourable to positive changes (like the black plague was) but it could also lead to the opposite. conditions of scarcity are usually not very good for egalitarianism. i’ll check out that podcast when i have some time, thanks
“anarchist collectives” by dolgoff is an anthology of participant accounts of everything from agriculture to decisionmaking - im sure there are more recent books that are great, but that was my big intro
When I was an undergrad, one of the big questions I was interested in was what were the material factors that led to revolutions. Some of my professors said it was when people had nothing to lose; others said it was when people had something to lose, usually property. Since then, I think I've began to lean more towards an idealist perspective because no real social revolutions happen without ideas fueling them. People have to be pushed forward by intellectuals, otherwise they just end up as petty squabbles. The masses tend to be unresponsive and conservative until their property and livelihood are threatened, but it usually takes someone crystallizing these concerns and making them conscious of it for anything to actually come to fruition. Thus, populist aggrandizers are the biggest catalyst in my opinion, but material conditions are also a factor, making the material and idea dichotomy a false one. I also think that applies to ontology, but that's a different topic altogether
well it’s like i say in the video, in more complex societies often material conditions change and it takes time for consciousness to catch up and for people to realize that the balance of power has changed in their favour, and once they do they can take action. but yes, materialism is simply the context in which agency is exercised.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Yeah that's where my main critique lies with Marx; his ideas only apply to western societies. I'm unsure what time zone you live in, but thanks for the late night replies
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 This debate is typically American : Europeans, as I am, think Americans are crazy not wanting social security because it could be restricting their freedom and so on. So from my point of view what you are saying is very clear. The problem now, is that since the fall of the Berlin Wall, European politics is going in that same direction and more and more people are fooled my this kind of reasoning. Thanks to give a clear voice to a more realistic and scientific way of analyze our society. It's a delight to hear someone telling what I thought but never express in a articulate way.
@@cristinadeperfetti7566 i think americans actually do want those things - according to polls most of them do - but they don’t actually think it’s possible, and the political system is so corrupt that no one even offers them those things. and i think its similar for europe - the economic powers are so strong that they prevent governments from expanding welfare states and are slowly destroying them. people see everything continually deteriorating regardless of who is in power, so they don’t believe anything better is possible.
Just in case it wasn't mentioned, there is also the Asturias Commune in 1934, which lasted only around two weeks, but was an actual independence from the Spanish government, they even minted their own coins. This rebellion was violently quashed by Franco later and was partically the reason he eventually rose to power. To some, the Civil War started in 1934 with this revolt, just to show how threatening it appeared to the entire country, partially because of the Asturian miners, who were capable of extreme cohesion, had posession of weapons and explosives, and valuable resources such as coal. However, I should also note that the republican side in the civil war had massive dissorganization issues (mostly because all the non-marine military joined Franco's side, until the soviet communists brought instructors to teach the militias in warfare and establishing some military discipline), to the point where it was referred to as a "hydra biting itself". Don't know if it's relevant, and I might have missed some details, but I thought it would help your materialism argument: It was the area with the proper conditions for a worker revolution (mostly in Euskadi and Asturias being prominent industrial centers and with important comercial ports) that cause such a revolt first, and then it was squashed. When the civil war started, the northern area was the first to be attacked because they knew it had the potential and conditions to do so again: The military campaign took those conditons into account, eliminated them, and it's why they were eventually victorious, by seizing the thigns that made the revolts possible in the first place.
Hii, i just wanted to say thank you so much for this episode with so many great examples. I had never heard of that part of Spain's history and it was so interesting! I especially wanted to thank you for the insight on the suffragette movement as it inspired some of my ideas in my latest video (I mention your podcast in it for credit:D) thank you for ur work, i can only imagine how much time these videos must take!
thank you! lots of this stuff is stuff people really need to know! i’ll have to check out your show when i have the time! and yes, the really complicated ones can take 6 months or more … but usually they take 2-3 months
While I agree with basically everything in this video, I think there are 2 glaring blind spots. 1.) Concerning women's suffrage. Woman getting the right to vote as a direct result of WW1 is a compelling argument that I would agree with. It provided a great step forward in giving women access to political power, but that alone did not produce gender equality. Women weren't allowed to have a personal bank account until 1974, 30 years after WW2. That is too big of a gap for me to say that WW2 was the most significant factor for that turning point in history. An important factor, but not the most significant. The most significant factor in women joining the workforce and gaining more economic and political power was largely due to economic shifts rather than a direct consequence of WW2. The conditions post WW1 for and post WW2 were largely the same, so why did it take so long for things to change? Given that men are on average, bigger, stronger and faster, when it comes to the manual labor market, women would not be able to compete on even ground. They would not have the same degree of bargaining power and did not until several technological advancements. Things like the dish washer, laundry machine and vacuum cleaner meant that home economics was easier than ever. Other inventions also opened up for more sedentary jobs that women could perform as well men at if not out perform. Growing corporations realized that half of the developed world's potential workforce wasn't working and that they had jobs to fill, so they launched a massive marketing campaign to help women's suffrage along. Second wave feminism, I would argue, was only possible through the convergence of economic interests with the interests of a social movement. It would not have happened otherwise as men would have the money and power to prevent it from ever happening. Two household incomes also provided an economic advantage. Families with two incomes would have a raised standard of living and could invest more money in their children to ensure they continued to have a raised standard of living for future generations. Also, since the market had more cash flow due to some families having more disposable income, prices rose. These factors forced more women to enter the workforce to maintain the same standard of living. Even more disposable income meant prices rose even more. Until we get to today's economy where two household incomes are not only the norm, but a necessity. Which is good for women's rights, don't get me wrong. But it also means that a single income is no longer enough to support a family or sometimes even an individual. Elizabeth Warren literally wrote the book on this "The Two Income Trap." Where price inflation due to doubling the income of a household results in the poorest, particularly black families, being shit on the hardest. We doubled household income without fixing prices which means the rich are a lot richer and the poor are a lot poorer than they were 50 years ago. 2nd wave feminism was a business maneuver much more than a civil rights movement. The solution is not social regression, but regulated pricing when it comes to food, healthcare and housing. Otherwise, no matter how much you raise the minimum wage, you'll never get any richer as corporations can raise prices to take whatever disposable income you have left. 2.) Concerning racial civil rights. Again, the fact that the 60's civil rights movement was set into motion so late after the end of WW2 makes me think that was not the most significant factor. An important one, yes, but maybe not the most important. I would argue the Soviet Union played just as important a roll for progressing American Civil rights as WW2. What really got me thinking about this was reading about the assassination of Fred Hampton. Fred Hampton was explicitly a Marxist who succeeded not only in gathering support from blacks, but also poor whites and latinos. He called it the Rainbow Coalition and was making progress in turning the civil rights movement into a multi-ethnic movement against poverty and economic inequality. Which makes sense. You cannot have social equality without economic equality. Many other civil rights leaders had socialist ideals as well. Even Martin Luther King. Which also made me wonder why I'd never learned about those speeches in school. The simple answer being: it was more profitable that we didn't. The Soviet Union is well documented in using US civil rights struggles in their propaganda, which really ramped up in the 60's. They hoped this could 1) be used to degrade US favorability in the eyes of other countries and 2) to fuel conflict internally in the US. Not only that, but the mere existence of the USSR provided a viable alternative to American capitalism and hope for a socialist revolution to succeed. Today, the wage gap between blacks and whites is wider now than it was 50 years ago. While social progress may have improved margionally, economic progress has halted which has also halted economic progress. The civil rights movement is only half complete and the half we got was black capitalism. Fred Hampton was assassinated by the FBI because US political and economic interests were genuinely afraid of communist revolution on US soil. They were afraid of Fred Hampton, or someone like him, becoming a "black messiah." Fred Hampton, a chairman of the black panthers, was uniting poor folks of all races and backgrounds under one banner. So he had to die. If US power structures have the power to socially engineer people into thinking a wedding is worthless without a diamond, that breakfast cereal is good for you and that black socialism never happened, why did they let the civil rights movement succeed at all? It happened because those in power saw it as the best way to maintain or increase their power. Corporations and politicians saw black lead socialism as a genuine threat to their power so they coopted it and mutated it into black capitalism to reinforce their power instead. And what do we have to show for it? A couple black billionaires, some more black folks on TV and not much else. Black folks are still the most incarcerated, murdered and poorest demographic along with latin folks and natives. The civil rights movement happened because it was the convergence of economic interests with social interests. And the reason so little has changed in 50 years is because the US no longer has a rival to push it to be better. China might compete with the US and other western countries in terms of economic power, but they are far behind on social issues. The US existing puts more pressure on China for social reform than the other way around. But what really scares me though, is as our technological power increases, governments and corporations may use that power to influence our thoughts and opinions on a scale most people can't even imagine much less articulate. All it would take for a channel like this to die is an algorithm tweak. If youtube decided "socialism" were a dirty word on a whim, would future generations ever be able to develop the tools to step out from under the boot of oppression? If google controls the search results for 70% of the internet, they can effectively decide what's fact and fiction. Government agencies can and have infiltrated radical movements to dismantle them from the inside. We are quickly approaching a socioeconomic state from which there is no escape. We may even already be there.
i think that the factors you’re describing are important, but i wouldn’t call them “glaring blind spots” - this isn’t a comprehensive video about how people got these rights, i’m just trying to show the material influences on things. ANd don’t underestimate the importance of the world wars. the wars were a huge factor, and historically are routinely a huge factor in the advancement of rights of average people, increasing their bargaining power. Athenian democracy comes from wars for example.
This is amazing content. This really opened my eyes as a leftist and social worker who is pretty interested and privy to such analysis but it was completely eye opening and enlightening to learn about the material conditions and succeeding contingencies that gave rise to our current condition. It’s funny too how the hierarchies discussed so far led to the eventual conditions where much of our current understanding of history and the men who documented/theorized/analyzed history were for a long time, (and probably still are today) unable to grasp this and thus tended to rationalize things in a way that rationalized the systems in place. Just curious, and assuming that you probably oppose neoliberal capitalism to sone extent and fall somewhere on the hard left, what do you suppose the best possible strategy would be to distrust capital/create the conditions necessary for socialism (or whatever you specifically see as a political goal)? If these conditions were achieved what do you think that would look like? Also this is extremely random, but I’m curious and really like your analysis... how do you feel about Georgism in conjunction with more anarchical/bottom up organization, and I guess just generally being implemented as a means to achieve market socialism? I used to think it was so dumb, but I honestly didn’t fully understand it. As a transition option, I think it makes so much more sense than Marx and Engels’ voucher/lower phase proposal. I think in terms of opulence it appeals to a larger scale of stake holders than most existing communist transition strategies, it has very few losers, it would disrupt our current system and allow us to shift the collective perspective further left without requiring so much revolution that it is just disrupting people, period. It promotes equality and at least IMO, would be able to address the inherent opposition the current system in the US has to the preservation of the environment and other living organisms. I am fairly radical and especially after learning about bargaining power and it’s impact on egalitarian organization I ultimately would like to see the “classless moneyless society”, but also I don’t think that will happen while I’m alive and I don’t think it will happen in a smooth and ethical way using the strategies tried thus far. However, I feel like earth is a ticking time bomb and capitalism is eating itself- so trying to slowly reform our way there, and exhausting insane amounts of energy for the possibility of raising the minimum wage, unionizing Amazon, or student loan relief seems like.... not a viable long term goal on its own lol. Though at the same time, circle jerking about theory online with no direction or game plan for meaningful praxis isn’t productive either. So I’m just curious what you think, and if you have any particular positions or ideas. This channel is seriously criminally undersubscribed though. I’ll recommend it, and I have been trying to find a way to relate one of the episodes to a class I GA for- I plan on working with this professor again for my final semester when he’ll teach practice and policy to the first year MSWs, and one hundred percent want to use your explanation of political terminology and the importance of using and understanding language in political discourse. I’m sure these take a ton of time and research. Sorry to ramble, and I know those are kind of big questions, but i really want to focus on this area in my activism more and get a wider range of ideas to build off of. Thanks again!
Hi! Thank you, I very much appreciate your comments and supportive words. They do take a lot of time, that’s why it usually takes me 3 months to put one out! Please do let people know about this. I don’t know enough about Georgism, and I don’t adhere to a very specific program as *the* route out of capitalism, but I think the guiding principle should always be that those who are affected by decisions should have a say in those decisions in proportion to how much they’re affected, and no one should have exclusive control or ownership of anything that other people depend on to live. So workers should manage their own workplaces, but consumers and local area where the businesses are located should also have a say in what’s produced and how etc, and eventually everything should be like one big cooperative, with resources managed by networks of local, regional cooperatives etc. I imagine the route to that is probably something like the “democracy at work” movement, and that would evolve into broader socialism over time vs competing in a market system. I think most people, whether they have a liberal or conservative bent, understand that there’s something inherently unjust in some people having power over others, and believe that people affected by decisions should have a say in them, so that the key is putting out these messages in language that everyone can relate to and understand, and to get people to realize that if all the people who believed in these principles got together we’d have enormous power to not only change things, but prevent our total destruction. Easier said than done, but I think that things are moving naturally in this direction, but there needs to be a bit of clarifying the muddle of political language in very simple and clear concepts, and distilling and breaking political problems into “most of the bad things we hate happen because some people are allowed to control resources that others depend on to live, and those people make all the decisions for everyone else without being subject the consequences” and that injecting this into the discourse will give our politics a much greater focus, cohesion and appeal to a broad public vs a small circle jerk of educated types.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 thanks for your quick response! Fully agree with you in that it should be wholistic- workers tend to and collectively own their workplace/means of production, and the rest of the community holds stake regarding the goods and services. For instance if me and my friends decide to open a smoothie shop, we would exchange schedules and decide on our hours, establish our by-laws, divy up the mundane tasks, etc... then engage with the community and see what types of smoothies they like, any special dietary restrictions to consider, ask them to weigh in on our bylaws and systems, etc. I fully agree that when it comes to bargaining power, a few rotten applies poison the whole bunch. And I would go as far as to say once a power imbalance is established, future generations of the actors in power will begin to rationalize and justify their privilege. Take chattel slavery- it’s not natural or very comfortable psychologically to acknowledge that your economic interests require you to absolutely dehumanize, objectify, exploit and often torture other human beings, and to empathize with them human to human. So we get people measuring the shapes of skulls, and creating an entire pseudoscientific fields of nonsense in an attempt to argue a given group of people are inherently less human- that it’s just in their blood to be subordinate and loyal like a sheep dog or something, and it would in fact be wrong and a recipe for disaster for them to exist in any other way. It becomes difficult when much of the current class conflict is so deeply vested in white supremacy, patriarchy, and imperialism that is packaged with dozens of excuses and narratives that reinforce them. But I believe even more so after looking into the anthropological evidence that this isn’t necessarily a natural or even ideal condition for humanity to flourish under. I definitely think these talking points are relevant to my masters students and program overall- I can pretty easily relate those sentiments to even the basic NASW code of ethics and core values and build off of that into whatever concepts for praxis people come up with or connect with, instead of coming immediately jumping into “remember kids leftism not liberalism!” and losing people or making it uncomfortable political but also will make future discussion about political terminology and stepping away from centrist language and thinking easier. Thank you for all your responses! I know Georgism was oddly specific but it’s kinda polarizing, yet has a very materialistic and egalitarian basis so I think it’s worth entertaining and there’s a lot of interesting directions it can take in this context. I’ll have to continue researching and seeing how it works with other framework. Have a great weekend !
@@sad-qy7jz if there’s a good quick overview of georgism that you recommend let me know, i’ll look at it. check out episodes 7 and 6 of this show if you haven’t btw, i cover some of the themes you’re talking about, anthropology of egalitarianism and hierarchy and i go into how for example a bargaining power advantage for men over women due to specific conditions turns into patriarchal ideology over time. i’ll be elaborating a lot on that sort of thinking in upcoming episodes. great weekend to you too!
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 can I post links in comments? I’ll edit it with a couple of the decent overviews and leftist applications among the rare few- since were so used to the idea of “tax” and “land” together alluding to private property or sone giant purchase to deforest and build factories on and keep the profits for yourself, the atlas shrugged fanboy type tend to just take it out of context and ignore 90% of the original ideas. Plus it usually is brought up as a solution to “sAvE CApiTalism” or as something entirely different way of forming a polity that transcends left and right (which simply isn’t true or even possible). I have a few papers, articles and videos where this stupid misconception doesn’t muddle it I can link or just post the citations so you they can be searched up. The single land tax seems like a really good way of addressing the hoarding of resources and the ability for capitalists, land lords, politicians, city planners, etc to profit from holding onto land and exploring workers and tenants as well as profiting from destroying nature. It would incentives people who will use and respect the land to instead use it. And since it applies to literally just basically all land, nature, systems etc that make up the land, it would no longer make sense for companies to cut corners or compete in ways that lead to pollution, natural devastation, or the destruction of wildlife habitats because you would have to pay for the damages to the land and things on it (trees, glaciers, animals, people affected by the changes to biosphere). Henry George’s overall strategy really addresses the problems with allowing hierarchy and leveraging power to emerge. This is a resllt great quote from him that sums this up fairly well; “The tax upon land values is, therefore, the most just and equal of all taxes. It falls only upon those who receive from society a peculiar and valuable benefit, and upon them in proportion to the benefit they receive. It is the taking by the community, for the use of the community, of that value which is the creation of the community. It is the application of the common property to common uses. When all rent is taken by taxation for the needs of the community, then will the equality ordained by Nature be attained. No citizen will have an advantage over any other citizen save as is given by his industry, skill, and intelligence; and each will obtain what he fairly earns. Then, but not till then, will labor get its full reward, and capital its natural return”. Besides ensuring citizens’ dividends or lifetime salaries, it seems like great conditions to reorganize labor more like co-ops or council syndicates. I’ll edit this with readings and sources that I think explain it will thoufh, and if you don’t have urls disabled I can share that too. Looking forward for more though! If you get around to checking any out (no pressure!) would love your thoughts and criticism. I’m not married to it, and see it as a way to transition out of capitalism that could probably make (almost) everyone happy who wouldn’t even consider anything with the c word, but I think anarchy and mutualism are ideal. EDIT: Georgism wiki: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism Ecotax wiki: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecotax LVT wiki: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons Tragedy of the Commons Wiki: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons Mexie has great insight to ToTCand the more environmental side of things. She has a rundown of ToTC that I think suffices Wikipedia. There’s another podcast called “acid horizon”- lol I know what you’re thinking based on the name, it’s a little post modern/heavy crit theory but still it has a lot of relevant episodes and the professional guests are amazing. I’ll link the channels shortly So Henry George’s own series Progress and Poverty is obviously your best source, straight for the horses mouth. Obviously, just like Marx but perhaps more glaringly, there’s certain things that you probably would rather change or do away with or that need to be adjusted per the conditions of 2021. “Barton, S. E. Berkeley Mayor J. Stitt Wilson’s 1911 Synthesis of Socialism, Georgism and Feminism”. (This paper should be free and accessible to anyone but I’ll post a link to the PDF if I can) Obviously I don’t fully embrace the authors’ positions but the critique, overview and points are relevant and there is some compelling information. (Link the PDF): www.researchgate.net/profile/Stephen-Barton/publication/263770987_Berkeley_Mayor_J_Stitt_Wilson's_1911_Synthesis_of_Socialism_Georgism_and_Feminism/ “ Cleveland, M. M. (2012). The economics of Henry George: a review essay. American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 71(2), 498-511.” I’m just realized the one originally had hear isn’t as valuable as I thought and this adjacent professor’s essay/critical review are much better time spent. ( the PDF): cooperative-individualism.org/cleveland-mary_review-of-phillip-bryson-the-economics-of-henry-george-2012-apr.pdf “Cui, Z. (2011). Partial intimations of the coming whole: the Chongqing experiment in light of the theories of Henry George, James Meade, and Antonio Gramsci. Modern China, 37(6), 646-660.” This one is fantastic actually I just started reading it but I haven’t finished yet. I do think the access is restricted but if you’re actively any academia you should have access if you search it through your institutions database or homepage. Here’s the link, but for anyone else reading it’ll request access or make you pay. students can just log into whatever portal you use or your university library and it should work fine : journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0097700411420852 The wiki pages for both Georgism and LVT have some pretty useful intro info and some decent sources to follow up on though I haven’t like sat down and read the entirety of each one. The channel “unlearning economics” (would absolutely recommend too!!!) leftist econ prof gave a quick but extremely clear and unique leftist explanation in his recent Q&A and has talked about it in conjunction with co-ops before. There’s a few pretty good videos explaining it as a 10-20 min rundown that aren’t confused ancaps for a quick summary, which I’m happy to link if anyone else is curious if I can. Another similar channel, Mexie, environmental studies/Econ prof did a video with Unlearning as well where they kinda get into LVT and some of the stuff I’m primarily getting at. I would go for at least a synopsis of Progress of Poverty though (ideally the books themselves but if not feasible) if you really want to kind of get what it entails and it’s potential. At least a synopsis before the other papers, just to identify liberalized interpretations. There’s a few indie papers or student papers that take the leftist framing further which although are at the graduate level and seem to be sourced, I would rather check all the sources before sharing it. I’ll link mexie, UE, and whoever else I mentioned in five or ten... If I scrambled anything by mistake I’m so sorry and shall proof read after work it .
@@sad-qy7jz thanks! i’ll check out the unlearning economics and the check out progress of poverty if interested - did you post links btw? because if you did they didn’t appear
This was amazing! I'd love to learn more about these episodes in particular and materialism in general. Can you recommend any books on the 1381 English peasant revolt and the anarchists in Spain? And is there any good books that offer an overview of materialism?
for the spanish anarchists a nice into is Anarchist Collectives by Sam Dolgoff which is a collection of eyewitness and participant reports. there’s a lot of stuff on libcom.org as well. For 1381 the books tend to be very short because the sources are sparse and all from the point of view of the nobility, but the one I remember is When Adam Delved and Eve Span by Mark O’Brien, but there are a bunch of others, maybe more detailed - and there’s a very entertaining lecture by SWP leader Paul Foot from the early 80s that you can find on youtube (the links are actually all in the show notes!)
" one of the most important episodes in history". That's how I see it too. However we also have to be critical when we talk about it. Take for example Mujeres libres. Mary Nash has a book about it. It's basically collection of their writings from the time. They tried to apply to the regional committee of CNT-FAI to be officially recognised as a part of the libertarian movement. They were rejected with explanation that female organisation would divide movement, created inequality, with unrepairable damages to working class. This is not to say that that didn't cooperated, they most certainly did, but patriarchy was still big at that time. They faced many problems dealing with man both on individual and organisational level. Of course this doesn't diminish great achievements that revolution made. Anyway just a good faith criticism from left perspective. Regarding free will it's a long debate and I'm no expert, but recently I read good book about it: " Behave" from Sapolsky. I'm leaning towards his conclusion that there isn't free will when it comes to our most important actions. Interesting read so check it out. Anyway great video, well researched and was pleasure watching
thanks, yes for sure, sexism was still important but it was surprising how advanced they were becoming for the time. i'll have to read up on this when i do a proper full episode or series on the spanish anarchists to include this - its hard to include all the details when covering something very broadly like in this episode, this was just a quick overview! I will check out sapolsky i was just reading him about baboons!
This is excellent. IMO your most important video so far. I hope it spreads far and wide! I will definitely be sharing. I have some questions and comments... 9:55: Ideal beauty age for women in Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) cultures (at least traditionally) is late 30s and 40s. This makes me happy. Source? (Searched and couldn't find) 38:30: "For the first time in the industrialized world, people successfully replaced the existing political economic and cultural hierarchies of the day with a system of radical democracy economic equality and even a high degree of gender equality." Perhaps not the gender equality thing, but I believe the rest was achieved to some degree in Russia Feb 1917 to Oct 1917 (revolutionary period before Bolsheviks took power) and Ukraine free territory (facilitated by the Makhnovists) 1918-1921 41:30 "anarchists organized massive labor unions with millions of members" Not quite: At its peak the CNT had 1.5 million members. 46:24 "anarchist self-government wasn't just limited to the workplace or the farm or the economic sphere local regional and federal deliberative bodies were formed where people could speak and vote and formulate general policy decisions from lower bodies went up to an executive whose job was to put into action what the lower bodies wanted" Hmm... are you sure? What sorts of policy decisions are you talking about? From what I've read, there were such bodies at the local level in villages, these were village assemblies. But beyond the local level, I think federations only existed for economic issues, such as coordinating development projects or mutual aid. There were also federations within the unions for decision making, and this is where things spanned both economic as well as non-economic political decisions. As far as I know there were no federations for non-local political decision making outside the unions. If I'm wrong please tell me the source that discusses this; I'd love to be wrong about this and I'd love to learn more! Unless you're talking about the Council of Aragon? My memory of this is fuzzy but I think it still wouldn't fit your description. 47:53 "it was the supposed communists on the republican side who were controlled by the soviet union who squelched the revolution" True, and they were the worst offenders. But don't forget the Republicans and "Socialists" in government who were also counterrevolutionary 48:53 "anarchist soldiers workers and peasants lost much of their zeal dedication and emotional investment in the war effort. Production slowed..." Production slowed for many reasons, such as the economic blockade on international trade, destruction of industry by bombing, loss of labor to the military effort. I'd guess that loss of morale would be a significant but not the dominant factor. (Forget where this is mentioned) Federations of village communes and industrial federations overcoming competition This was true to some degree, but market competition was not entirely eliminated. But I trust that had the revolution had more time to develop, and wasn't being sabotaged and attacked by the counterrevolutionary "Communists", "Socialists", Republicans, and finally fascists, that market competition would have been completely overcome within a few more years.
Thanks! And thanks for the input and corrections! As this was a general overview of things I’ve known about for a long time, a lot of the stuff in this particular episode was from memory with a little review to refresh my memory - so I might have gotten some things wrong - normally I’d check all your corrections, but I just don’t have time right now so if you have some sources to show where I made mistakes, please send them and I’ll address it all in the upcoming QnA episode - needless to say when I do proper episodes on each subject I will be reading extensively. My description on the origins of feudalism was I think the most off - what I said was correct for some places but not the general situation. One big thing I missed is that the Haudenosaunee were an important inspiration for the american suffragettes! I read about it after I published this episode. For the haudenosaunee women cultural ideal age being 30s and early 40s: This is something I’ve heard a few times over the years, probably just from the mouths of native people - I *think* most recently I heard it from a law professor who spoke at a bar association presentation last year - she also said there was no rape in the 5 nations, which I’ve also heard before. When I was writing the script for the episode I looked, but like you I couldn’t find anything to confirm it - I put it in anyways because I’d heard it a couple of times over the years. For your corrections, most of what you said I think is right but a few things I’m not sure: You’re right about Russia and Ukraine, I should have mentioned that. I think what sets Spain apart is that the anarchists controlled such large urban and rural territories, where in Russia it was certain workplaces and industries and the soviet deliberative bodies were competing with the parliament at the same time so they didn’t have exclusive control. With Ukraine I know they controlled a large territory, but did they actually abolish wage labour and collectivize most of the industries and agriculture the way they did in spain? Again I’ll want to do a full episode on this and will have to re-lean about it in detail, I think I was 19 when I read about the Maknovschina I assume you’re right about CNT numbers, but if gave an actual number or range of numbers I must have read it somewhere - maybe there were millions of workers and peasants in all the anarchist organizations? I know there were 7 mil + people in the anarchist territories. For the anarchist assemblies, again I was going off memory, but I do remember specifically reading a bunch of stuff about huge organizations spanning across the anarchists zones where anyone could participate in decisions beyond economics in a manner similar to the early soviets, but more organized - one example of non economic decisions that the mass of people participated in is was whether or not the FAI-CNT would participate directly in the republican government with ministers, rather than in parallel outside the government. Wasn’t the whole point of the FAI political decision-making and the CNT unions economic decision-making (hence the FAI-CNT as the ultimate organization)? You tell me!
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Hi! You're right that the revolution in Spain went much further than in Russia or Ukraine. But I think the achievements in these earlier cases are enough that they deserved a nod. Hmm... my guess is that the "millions" number you were thinking of is the number workers and peasants who participated in collectivized self-managed industry or village communes. "one example of non economic decisions that the mass of people participated in is was whether or not the FAI-CNT would participate directly in the republican government with ministers, rather than in parallel outside the government." This was a decision made within the CNT, I believe it was at a plenary involving hundreds of CNT delegates who'd been mandated by their local CNT branches/chapters. So it was not a decision open to the masses of people, just those in the CNT. (Of course this particular decision, of whether the CNT should join the government, is not a decision that non-CNT members should be involved in.) Arguably one of the weaknesses of the Spanish revolution is that it didn't develop soviets or workers councils, bringing together delegates of workers on a non-sectarian basis for industrial self-management and political self-governance, as happened in Russia and, to lesser degrees, other historical cases of mass working-class uprisings, and ironically this weakness was due to the strength of its unions as an organizing force. Workers generally continued to organize through their unions, as these were the pre-existing structures, so of the worker self-managed enterprises, you'd have CNT-controlled sections of industry and UGT-controlled sections of industry. And outside of the state itself, political decision making also tended to take place in the unions (with the exception of village communes, but that's hyper-locally). So in terms of organization, the working class remained divided. It's been a long time since I read about this history but I think there was at least one, possibly two attempts at bringing together unions and working-class parties in particular regions (Aragon and maybe somewhere else?) to form something akin to a revolutionary council, but I don't think they were good examples of bottom up participatory democracy. "Wasn’t the whole point of the FAI political decision-making and the CNT unions economic decision-making (hence the FAI-CNT as the ultimate organization)? " The FAI was a federation of anarchist groups throughout Spain. It was never meant to be any sort of mass participatory body for political decision making. It was an organization for anarchists only, and small in comparison to the CNT. FAI members were expected to join the CNT; I'm not sure if this was an official policy or just an expectation. One of FAI's primary goals was to exert influence (through persuasion and taking an active role in organizing, not authority) within the CNT to ensure that it remained true to its anarchist-syndicalist mission and didn't deviate into reformism, as happened to the originally syndicalist CGT in France. After all, the CNT (like the CGT) had open membership to any working class person, regardless of politics. Due to the heavy influence of the FAI within the CNT, it was often called the FAI-CNT. Off the top of my head one source I remember which sums up this history concisely and quite well is Tom Wetzel's Workers Power and the Spanish Revolution (can easily find online). An Anarchist FAQ is another good online source.
@@LuckyBlackCat ok thanks - i definitely need to reread this stuff, ill check out the Wetzel for sure. when you say the decision to join the government was just made within the CNT - that means the CNT membership did get to make non economic decisions such as that one right? so you’re saying decision making was not open to non members, but members did engage in broad political decisionmaking and not just economic decisions in their industry?
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Yes, correct. But I don't think it's accurate to describe this as "self-government", at least not in the broader sense that is usually implied by that term. It's self-governance of their union and its activities, but not beyond that.
@@LuckyBlackCat but if the union is the governing power, then what’s the difference? i guess the difference is just for people who aren’t part of the union?
thanks! ooh i forgot that i had mentioned occupy - do you know where in the video it is? i’m working on a critique of occupy as part of the critique of the Graeber/Wengrow book, but I didn’t realize that I talked about it already, i want to see what I said before!
During the part of the video 45:22 where you said that some agricultural areas distributed goods on demand for free and said that this didn't work, I have actually learned the contrary. In the book The Anarchist collectives by Sam Dolgoff, an in depth account is given of various practices put in place across Anarchist Catalonia during the Spanish civil war. The record noted that many places in Catalonia in this period had replaced the exchange system for a kind of gift economy based on need and desire (though the majority of Catalonia still used money and/or a barter system). Collective villages such as Binefar for example, not only had committees that provided for the local inhabitants but also cared for refugees that came to the village who were displaced by war. An interesting thing to note was that they even took the effort to meet the needs of people who were too young or injured to work. Agricultural collectives such as Graus and Alcora also achieved a similar level of libertarian communism. Again, just can't stress enough how good your videos are.
hi - i was using the same book as a major source! but my memory is that he talked about certain places using ration cards, and other places having “each according to need” take whatever you want (including wine), and that the places that did the each according to need system soon switched to ration cards. am i wrong? can you tell me which pages you’re referring to?
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Don't know the exact page number would be for your book if you're using a hard copy because I used a PDF format, but it is located in chapter 10. is the title "collective in Binefar" listed in your table of contents by any chance? It's listed in my online version of the book. Other collectives are also listed.
@@hassankhan-jg1dx hey i just re-read the collective in Binefar section but i didnt notice anything about everything being free. it is however a really interesting section about how the government was trying to starve the soldiers on purpose so they would go attack the collective and take their food! The part i’m talking about is in the section Money and Exchange p 73: “Some collectives did in fact abolish money. They had no system of exchange, not even coupons. For example, a resident of Magdalena de Pulpis, when asked, "How do you organize without money? Do you use barter, a coupon book, or anything else?," replied, "Nothing. Everyone works and everyone has the right to what he needs free of charge. He simply goes to the store where provisions and all other necessities are supplied. Everything is distributed free with only a notation of what he took." However, these attempts to really abolish money were not generally successful. Peirats recalls that: Under the constant pressure of political-military circumstances, the first attempts to abolish money and wages had to be abandoned andreplaced by the family wage.”
great video!! i haven’t looked much into anarchist Spain yet, but this inspired me to do more research, it sounds fascinating (and tragic of how it ended)
This is an amazing episode! However, there is one little question that's been sorta bothering me. If we want to create a Spain-like anarchist revolution in the US, how will we go about garnering the support of rural populations. The thing is unlike Spain, the majority of US farmers are small landholders, not tenant farmers working for a landowner. I need some ideas for how we can overcome this. P.S. Another thing I want you to mention sometime on this podcast is the modern day examples of anarchist principles in practice that closely mirror the Spanish Revolution, like Rojava, or the Zapatista communities in Chiapas, Mexico
ha, well i think first we need to worry about getting just anyone on board - like urban people! to have a real free socialist movement you need the vast majority of the population on your side - but agricultural people are like 1% of the population, so aside from big corporation, it really doesn’t matter all that much if they want to keep their land. even in anarchist spain they let people keep their private land if they wanted, so long as they didn’t hire labour. the real issue is how to communicate with normal people not just political freaks who are a tiny proportion of the population. and yes i should talk about rojava, i’m just out of date on it so reticent to talk about things i don’t know, and spending so much time researching for the epsiodes that it’s fallen behind. I mentioned zapatistas last episode (11.1) in the contexts of peasants naturally being interested in anarchism.
there’s a link to a bibliography for every episode in the shownotes! for this one i think it’s just Anarchist Collectives edited by Sam Dolgoff, which is a series of participant accounts, but there are a zillion other books and articles on the subject up on libcom.org
Revolution and Counter Revolution in Spain by Felix Morrow goes into the political and military side of it and also explains the betrayal of the Stalinists and the Soviet Union
Great content. Love where we're going with this talk. Until embarrasingly recently, I'd argued that Marx was a misunderstood genius and that countries which ostensibly enacted Marxist socalist policies were just Doing It Wrong. But brutal oppression and inequality isn't a bug, it's a feature. All Power to All the People would require lives where we aren't born on an exploitative slope; it'd require land to be treated more like children ought to be...
Any idea when the next episode will be out man? I started with the one last one on why attempts at so called communism descend into authoritarianism because I was specifically looking for an answer to that question, before going back to the beginning but I really can’t wait to hear you go deeper into the Russian revolution.
in a couple of weeks, editing now - but it’s not the next russian revolution one - that’s going to be in a few months - it was just too much work for too long, so i wanted to take a break and do something easier - though honestly this one also took way too long and too much work… ill get back to russian revolution after i do a couple of other easier ones
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Happy to support someone putting out excellent, thought provoking content. Really hope your hard work pays off and it gets the attention it deserves.
Can you a make full episode on the spanish revolution and the paris commune? I believe understanding the politics of what the soviets did during that time and different material conditions that led the soviets to crush the anarchist revolution including need to western allies for war efforts is essential to further understanding the revolution and the nature of politics. Specially given the fact that USSR is how most in the world associate left wing politics with,specially ofcourse socialism
i might do those, but i assume there are already good videos on that? i usually only do something if there’s nothing on it, or if i have an original perspective on something
Hi, hope you or someone who knows sees this, but at 45:20 you say some tried to abolish money but this didn't work so well. Do we know what they tried to do instead of having money? And what do you mean by it didn't work so well? Great video also, thanks!
they tried different things in different villages and regions - a lot of places had vouchers allocated by family size, which i think did work, and some places tried just ‘take what you want from the store’ which didn’t work and they went to ration cards / vouchers.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 wow thanks! I often thought it would probably take a while with free access, at least until the new society is stable. Whether rationing is the way to go though, am still not sold (pun not intended but I wish it was lol). I guess the pros of rationing is it stifles the possibility for corruption that money brings, and the complications with pricing/exchange that labour vouchers do too. Maybe in a free society you'd have rationing for essentials and a labour voucher system for luxuries, then gradually phase out rationing into free access, after which do the same with luxuries.
@@truthhertz10 i dont really have strong opinions on this stuff, it’s stuff to do trial and error and see what works or not. and by not working i forgot to answer - it meant people were just taking too much stuff and they kept running out - in particular the wine!
Thanks so much for the excellent content. Can you suggest more detailed resources about the methods the anarchists used to achieve their success? Would love to get some step by step instructions about how to organize this way.
you’re not going to find step by step instructions anywhere, and we don’t know how it would have fared long term, but you can read first hand participant accounts in the compilation Anarchist Collectives by Dolgoff and there are many books on the subject now, you can find a ton of them on libcom.org
probably several months - it takes me about 1-2 months full time to make one of these, and I got sidetracked onto other topics, but I will defnitely be making that episode, you can’t understand capitalism without understanding property rights and you can’t understand alternatives to it without looking at how property is managed in other societies
36:31 sounds like an argument for idealism over materialism right there It's not a sensible question, anyway, which approach to politics is 'right' or even determines the other
which argument? but materialism and idealism work together - but i focus on material perspectives because they’re almost completely ignored in academic humanities to the point where people don’t know basic things like where male dominance came from etc
thanks! i hadn’t thought of it, but I think the stuff from these videos applies to every form of oppression and discrimination. you want to push for structures and institutions that give everyone equal bargaining power and decision making authority regardless of ability, and in the meantime you want to raise awareness and make people conscious of the issue. maybe i should talk about it when i do an episode about socialism. what are your thought on it?
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 love the idea. Love all of your videos and can’t wait for you to explore more specific themes regarding these particular social, societal and structural issues from an Anthropological and materialist perspective.
17:50 Fun fact: in Canada, women getting the federal vote is partially what caused conscription of Canadian men in WW1. Basically, during the war, the government was very split on whether to enact conscription or remain a purely volunteer army. The PM, who wanted conscription but didn’t have the political will to do it, knew he might lose the next election, so he passed women’s suffrage for the very first time, but specifically only for women who already had a family member in the army (in essence, only women who would be vastly more likely to agree with his platform could vote), he won a huge majority, and conscription was passed. My Canadian history teacher in college always thought that story was hilarious.
love that story, did not know that! often huge things like women’s rights can hinge on political calculations by/for one person if that person is high enough in the hierarchy!
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 I entirely agree with you. Arguably the most relevant questions of today is what we can learn from 1381 & 1936. You mentioned how the communist party was the major cause for the demise of the anarchists, referring to the civil war within the civil war. I've read & heard sources speaking also about the endorsement of Franco with ammunition, soldiers, and resources by capitalists like Ford and Exxon. Isn't it an equally important cause, and isn't such the major obstacle we face today in applying the lessons from both peasant episodes? What are your thoughts on this?
yes 100% the fact that the fascist side was way better equipped was a huge reason for the loss - but by all accounts the anarchists stopped fighting very vigorously and lost all their enthusiasm after the communists dismantled all of their collectives and their militias etc. I didn’t actually say that this was the main reason, I said that “some people say” this, just to emphasize that it was a big issue. I don’t really have an opinion on what the main reason was as I read this stuff years ago and would need to re-read it to say anything with any confidence!
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 The Anarchist leaders joined the Republican government despite their "NO STATE" belief. Stalin's NKVD played the role of butchers of anyone suspected of "Trotskyism." Franco Troops were Moroccan and no attempt at recognizing national independence for Moroccans was made. No leadership both independent and capable of leading and establish a state power independent of the "Anti Fascist coalition" of Bourgeois liberals, Anarchist leaders and Stalinist leadership arose. A victory in Spain would have had a powerful effect in the Soviet Union and could have rolled across Europe to France next and defeated Hitler and putting Stalin in his own gulag.
Look forward to the private property video. Though I would have thought wide-spread private property rights was a good thing. That's what I got from watching "Power of the poor" by Hernandez De Soto.
property rights can be good if they protect you from bigger actors trying to coerce you, but in general they serve to allow bigger actors to coerce people who depend on their property to live (employees, tenants, sharecroppers, etc) - i should check that video out though, always good to see how people are arguing the other side
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Ideally everyone would own land, or have a community land trust and have the land owned by the community/collective, but you need a way to reward people for their productivity and input. Its not fair for 1 person to work 12 hours every day toiling the land, and get the exact same compensation as someone that only works for 12 hours per week. It leads to productive/entrepreneurial people moving to countries/areas where there is private property and the can enjoy the fruits of their labor (brain drain). Yep, def. a great video worth watching.
@@jzk2020 i think the way people get paid is something to experiment with and see what works best, but the most important thing is to make sure no one has the power to dominate anyone else. so personal property should be exclusive to an individual, but anything that more than one person depends on to live, whether it’s a workplace, an apartment building, a lake - needs to be controlled by the people that depend on it, not just one person. as soon as you allow private ownership of property that others depend on, inequality just skyrockets and doesn’t stop until there’s a giant calamity, war, etc.
Take away the petro revolution gains, and women will pour back into the home/under their men’s protection. Material (I like to think of it as tech - tools, stuff, and institutions made possible by them) moves the mean consciousness, not just sitting around thinking about how nice it’d be to be nice. This channel is a bit too ‘noble savage’ for my liking, but it still presents some genuinely thought-provoking ideas. Keep it up!
@@marmadukescarlet7791 whatever way you want to describe it is fine - I guess it’s just basic simple political theory that is very neglected and misunderstood, but if you have a better way of describing it, please do!
@@marmadukescarlet7791 you mean calling it that or posting it in anthro spaces? you can definitely call it that, and it’s in the materialist or “behavioural ecology” tradition. a lot of anthro schools hate that stuff though, so it might get a bad response in those circles depending on who’s there!
Oh right - number 9 and 9.1 etc are the ones on cancel culture / right wing dominance hierarchy disguised in left wing terms - what is property will be episode 11 (the other Graeber and Wengrow chapters will be 10.1, 10.2 etc). i forgot to move the cancel culture ones to the main playlist cause those were initially just going to be a QnA spitball type series
I can't find any more info online about attraction to people of different ages being dependent on conditions, although that is absolutely huge, right?! We're told constantly stuff like men and women are attracted to X because it's biology (shrug), while intuiting that to be a weaponized and convenient excuse for whatever the norms are at the moment. Could anyone point me toward more information on this? Thanks.
this is something I’ve heard anecdotally from mohawk people a couple of times. Most recently at a bar association lecture the speaker who is Mohawk mentioned it, but i've heard it a few times over the years. however, when I sat down to find some source for it for the video, Iike you I couldn’t find anything, but I chose to include it anyways, so make of it what you will. I do believe that biology certainly has a role to play in what we’re attracted to, but so does culture and material conditions. If you want a good book about how economics affect sexual attraction and satisfaction read Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism by Kristen Ghodsee where they had data from eastern vs western europe that showed that the type of guys women were attracted to were different as were the nature of romantic relationships, and how much attention men had to pay to women's sexual satisfaction when women were not dependent on men economically vs when they were. If you want to barf you can also read pickup artist loser Roosh V’s book on how he wasn’t able to use his con man pickup psychopath techniques on Danish women, (entitled “Don’t Bang Denmark) because they weren’t attracted to money or flashy status symbols the way women in other countries are because they have “too much” economic independance...
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Hahaha. Thanks for the reply! This is maybe the third time someone has recommended this book (the first lol), so it sounds like I need to get on that. And I really appreciate your work.
@@moeg.280 thanks, i appreciate that you appreciate it! Even though the book is a few years old already Ghodsee has recently been interviewed on several podcasts so look for those, I think there’s one on the Jacobin youtube channel from a month a go or two
Hi, it's me your vegan friend. You have a degree in anthropology, right? I recommend mentioning this in each video description and also the About page for your channel. Not that I think we should blindly trust people with degrees, but it does add credibility to your arguments and make people more likely to watch your videos in full.
i do - i’m just averse to giving biographical details about myself, but i guess it matters that people know i have some qualifications to know what i’m talking about, though i don’t think one needs a master’s degree to have read widely and in depth on a subject
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 I agree! It's just that I saw one of your videos posted on reddit and someone's comment was asking, 'Who did this video? What is their credentials?' (paraphrasing) It brought to mind that many people will make snap judgements about whether someone is credible or not and a degree is a quick way to convince someone. Btw, I forgot to mention, this is a great video, as usual. Keep up the excellent work!
I guess from what I understood, idealism and materialism don’t necessarily have to be at odds with one another but actually rely upon one another. Material conditions don’t determine where a society can go nor how it develops but hence the need for ideas to form and spread. Simultaneously, ideas aren’t enough to change society and the means which they flourish can dependent upon the conditions that allow it.
more like materialism sets the contraints that peoples’ ideas and free will can operate in, and increases or decreases the probability that people will make certain choices vs others, and peoples ideas tend to relate to their experience in reality, and are an adaptation to that reality
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 so are saying that materialism comes first or does idealism? Are ideas dependent on the material conditions or can ideas reshape it and move progress via our ideas?
@@guyguy7634 the material world limits what is possible - we can change our conditions accoridng to our ideas, but only within the limits that material reality makes possible!
@@guyguy7634 im not really sure what that means. we get our ideas from a combination of our environment and culture and natural proclivities and constitution
in anthropology and zoology nowadays, they usually call it “behavioural ecology” - I don’t really know of a particular textbook or book that goes over the whole tradition. The Foraging Spectrum by Kelly which was updated in 2013 examines the spectrum of hunter gatherer societies and the anthropology of those societies from a behavioural ecology perspective. Actually Graeber and Wengrow have an article from 2018 called Many Seasons Ago where they outline the behavioural ecology arguments for why california foragers based their economy on acorns instead of salmon even though acorns suck and they had lots of salmon available, and it’s a good read. Graeber and Wengrow try to argue against behavioural ecology to some extent but I think their argument falls flat! If you can find the version of it in American Anthropologist journal you can see a little debate back and forth because other anthropologists respond to Graeber and Wengrow’s article.
i think there are several other people who have done good vidos on that? i usually stick to stuff that no one has done a good job of and articulate ideas that haven’t been synthesized yet or that are unduly obscure
i think i mentioned it in the video, but they’re not exclusive, they work together, they’re both facets of the same thing - i focus on materialism because our culture or so intent on ignoring it.
there are a lot of good books nowadays, but the one I know best is Anarchist Collectives by Sam Dolgoff, a collection of eyewitness/participant accounts. You can also find a lot of stuff online on libcom.org
ooh, i just found it on my computer - it’s called “Peurmanent FX” - not sure if it’s been released or if he just gave it to me - you can contact him on his bandcamp page though
I find the brief period of anarchist spain interesting as compared and contrasted with the american south. both groups lost their civil wars and both groups seemed to retain a fair amount of their ideology in spite of the loss. whenever i hear of "a great thing" (that got defeated) I always wonder exactly what sets those things apart from "the great things" that last for hundreds of years.
@@choosecarefully408 I mean political stability. i mean, i know the US has some dark history, but the injustice we experience, which is real, seems to be on a desireable level compared to places with coups and stuff. we had only one civil war for example. i know its a complex picture, but the internal peace of the US has helped bring about a lot of positive human activity. for everything else that deserves to be said about google/youtube, its pretty cool that anybody with something to say can share it with potentially thousands if not millions of people. if the (actual) left is going to succeed, it will be because technology has enabled co-operation and independence at a scale much larger than was possible before. if they were devils who founded the US, then the devils deserve their due. it may not have been very democratic at the start, but it was built vulnerable to democracy and we have seen lots of slow reform without the need for revolution, the only exception so far being slavery, which for my money is proof of why politics are a flawed way of reforming society. being black in 1870 was better than 1850 i am sure, but the road to liberation is much longer than amending the constitution and settling it on the battlefield.
This is really interesting, however you forgot to include Australia and New Zealand in your anglosphere analysis. Australia's geopolitical claim as one of the oldest, most inventive parliamentary and social democracies has been well established. It's also the first nation to grant women the vote. The secret ballot, the eight hour day and the wage arbitration system originate in Australia. Granted it's not perfect, as the constitution then only applies to white Australian. As indigenous I'm acutely aware of the injustices in the system. However, I'm hopeful that this will change, especially with the current government. I'm interested in your analysis regarding the material conditions that made these changes possible
hi - super interesting i didn’t know this about australia - i just checked and saw women got the right to vote in 1902. i did know that australia had the first socialist government ever elected - but i just don’t know enough about australia to know why this happened. for female suffrage my guess is that women’s labour was really important giving them a lot of bargaining power (this was one of the factors leading to womens’ rights in scandinavia), and maybe because it’s a big continent there’s lots of place to escape to for a woman with a domineering husband? maybe as an ex prison colony there were less women vs men, so they had more bargaining power that way as potential spouses? but i just don’t know. the one thing i do know but i still am not sure of why is that in australia the indigenous people were all immediate return hunter gatherers, which is a type of hunter gatherer that in most of the worst has gender equality, but in australia, although the traditional aborigines are very egalitarian compared to most societies, there’s also male dominance which is unusual for immediate return societies. there are debates about whether that’s somethings that’s relatively recent or ancient and why that would be.
i’m interested, but don’t know enough ebout it at this point to point you in a good direction, and i probably have 10 years worth of other subjects i want to cover before i get there, so not likely to happen soon!
Do you have a source for Haudenosaunee women being considered most attractive in late thirties and early fourties? I'm trying to win an internet argument. Fantastic series btw. I've watched and rewatched each episode
thanks - no actually, i’ve heard it talked about a few times from mohawk people. i looked for some kind of source for it to cite for the video, but honestly couldn’t find anything!
Also, is there a place I can download these episodes? If the podcast “it could happen here” comes true, I’d love to have your analysis in my bunker (or commune)
of this show or about materialism? there are a bunch of episodes since this! the dawn of everything ones are all about materialism, and i did a couple 9, 9.1 on culture war stuff
yes - equality vs hierarchy. you can divide it up into different categories - political institutions, economics, culture, international relations - but it’s always hierarchy vs equality
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 the only competing definition I have would be publicization vs privatization, but I think you articulated that these water down what those concepts are intrinsically tied to, and public ownership (from my basic understanding) is when the people decide with equal stake in how an industry is run, with more initiated members leading policy but with open-minded reception to differing desires- this is also what I was highlighting when I mentioned the difference between a leader and a ruler.
@@Thrna_1 yeah private vs public just adds a layer of confusion because the definition of public is contentious and private depends on private property concepts. basically if people have an equal say in the decisions that affect them, in proportion to how much the decisions affect them, you’re on the left (and “public” fits that depending on your definition of public) while if there’s a hierarchy of decision making it’s on the right (and “private” fits there if you mean private owner decides what to do and dependant people have to contract with the owner etc.
You mention Hungary and Austria, and WWI, as influences on “Anglo countries”’ shift to women’s right to vote. But the suffrage movements in both Hungary and Austria, as well as Anglo countries, were in fact predominantly influenced by the Russian revolution -- first the "February revolution" of 1917: women’s right to vote in Russia was adopted in March 1917. Then, after the Socialist "October revolution" of 1917 women's rights in Russia were expanded further. These developments, and the robust Russian women's movement that participated in the revolution, had a huge impact on the women's rights movements in Europe and the US. One and a half years later limited right to vote was adopted in Austria and Hungary, and in 1919, in the US. Historian Julia Mickenberg has written about this fascinating history - "Suffragettes and Soviets: American Feminists and the Specter of Revolutionary Russia" (The Journal of American History, Vol. 100, No. 4, March 2014). Also -- thank you, your podcast is fascinating.
Since you talked about Iroquois, I've been thinking about a thought experiment how would the gender relations develop over centuries if gunpowder was never invented, since lack of it would prevent their conquest by USA and the industrial revolution. This thought experiment also is dependent upon them embracing european agricultural technices and weapons like cavalery or pikeman. And I think they would due to rising population and military presures from other tribes and maybe even some Europeans. I think thease thinks would cause men staying at home more. European agricultural technices like plowing were dependent upon man's work and better military technologies reguering lesser procentege of man to operate. Men staying at home tends to lead to them using their military power to gain political power. This might result in warrior chiefs making themself more and more independent upon the Clan Mothers and latter replacing them with apointed mayors or administrators. Also it is possiable they would keep good chunk of their power like keeping power over village administration or coming to dominate clergy or comertional activities like the women in Sparta did. This would by my opinion probably result in European style monarchy with king and male dominated warrior nobility and female dominates or mixed merchants and clergy PS: I think lack of gunpowder would result in 1. USA never conquering them since without it it would by late 18th century became dominated by warrior nobles who would never cross Appalachia 2. Since first Europeans would never came to dominate India and Indoneasia which greatly helped fund the British one and second since the European system would remain dominated by monarchies ruling with consent of nobles and merchant and never have the move toword purely burguas ones
there are a lot of assumptions built in there which would change the scenario radically if they didn’t turn out to be correct, but that’s certainly a plausible scenario!
@@janvancura8412 well, maybe they wouldn’t adopt european farming techniques because they would still suffer population decimation because of european diseases, so there wouldn’t be the population pressure to adopt those. or maybe the europeans wouldn’t be limited to behind appalachia etc - maybe the fact that there is more free land but with a weaker european government, european lower class people can escape into indian land and this forces european governments to be more democratic in response. lots of possibilities, too many unknows!
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Well thats why I have these proceseas last centuries, so the population pressures would eventually apear. It is likely some minor European involvement beyond appalachia aside from trade most likely from Mountin tribes of European decent form by escaping peasants or settled Scots. Well if the local monarch (it is imposiable European goverment would be able to keep other in name only control without gunpowder) would ever give some estate style representation to the peasants, they would revoke once it fills up
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Also one think that I find most is that the same think that lead to Matriarchy surviving is the same think that lead to them being crushed, which is lack of farm animals
i’d say you can barely understand politics at all unless you know some anthropology! and sadly nowadays you can get a PhD in anthro in many schools and never learn most of this stuff
100% - servile labour is servile labour, all these forms resemble eachother with a little more or less freedom for the worker, same with the spanish tenant farmers and roman coloni
You will probably be interested to hear, that in Switzerland changes to the constitution have to be voted on by the "people" (at that time men), women only achieved the right to vote/ elect in 1971 (1991 in Apenzell Innerhoden, where men voted all together at the same time in an open space - Landsgemeinde). The cantons (like states in the USA) hold a lot of autonomy and wheras in other country only politicians had to be convinced, in Switzerland a majority of men had to agree to women's right to vote.
yes! and like i mentioned, switzerland was not involved directly in WWII or WWI so women didn’t get the bargaining power advantage they had in the other participart countries.
Excellent. I'm listening, as I mentioned before, from Munich (mostly while swimming in one of our public pools) coming more from the side of philosophy or the critique of philosophy by Ludwig Wittgenstein. If one is "blinded" (like me) "by Wittgenstein" everything that you say makes perfect sense as W. inimitably demonstrates how everything that makes us up externally as well as internally (even "thoothache)" is a function of our "form of life" which, of course, is materially ingrained.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Wittgenstein, as I understand him, is merely exposing philosophy's baselessness. He shows us how to cast off the urge to philosophize, identifying what counts and suffuses us in the effect of the rules that shape human interaction. - It's a pity that the anarchists discarded not only the Roman church, but also Christianity that actually underlies and fuels their project.
@@MartinThau i’m sure you can be a good anarchist with any religion or lack of religion! orwell felt that their anarchism was actually a religious belief in its own right. their experience with organized religion was as a tool of social control so they hated it with a passion for the most part
Hey! It's always me, the biologist who thinks free will is a scientific impossibilty. Great video as always, but sorry if I would like to divert again the topic of this video with my obsession for free will. If I'm being to insistent to talk about the theme of free will, that might upset or simply not interest you, please tell me and I will stop making these kind of comments. If you like me making these kind of monothematic comments, here's my question: Don't you think that the non existence of free will completely solve this debate of idealism Vs materialism, in favour of a full materialist perspective?
yeah im not super interested in that - for me, it’s not a debate, if you think if will as a material reality constrained by material reality, genetics, history, culture etc
"latifundia...where a powerful aristocrat owned huge swaths of land worked by tenant farmers ... who own nothing but their own labor and some personal possessions." kinda like wage slaves today who own their own car and a computer at most and work for companies that are either owned by or themselves work in the interest of some of the wealthiest people in the world.
The idea that WW1 experience (and not the Spanish Flu, or what have you) put the mind zap on the previously clueless and isolated womenfolk and that this explains the failure of a timely response to material conditions limps a bit, IMO. It sounds even rather idealist. The American war was relatively short and the AEF never had much more than 2 million men abroad at any time (total military did exceed 4 million) out of a population of over 100 million. However, the idea that women never communicated much until they hit factories--where they DID have time to goof off and chew the fat is and share their new radicalism is, well, not obvious. I think a fair view is that urban women WERE connected through many channels before the war and that there isn't so much to suggest that the war (or the Flu) changed social patterns among female Americans in an important way. That said, "collective awakening," while hardy a particularly materialist concept, is definitely a thing among human groups and I can't say that your theory is wrong, bit it feels more supposed than your ever thoughtful material typically does. The real reason the 19th Amendment happened is because the GOP calculated that women would vote disproportionately Republican, ergo they should have the right to vote. This is how African-Americans got the right to vote. The Republican Party saw they could (and for a time did) allow the GOP to utterly dominate the politics of the postbellum South and thus national politics entirely. It wasn't because the war and emancipation led African-Americans to a new consciousness and new opportunities to communicate and organize, though those factors were present and one is free to make that argument.
i think that “collective awakening” due to new circumstances is a totally materialist argument - even if it’s not correct in a given scenario. i never said anything about the 19th amendment or about the civil war leading to new black consciousness, that doesn’t even make sense given the circumstances. and i certainly didn’t argue that every war gives people new consciousness, though it very often gives them more bargaining power. i’m sure there was some political calculation involved in the 19th amendment, but if that were the entire reason for it, then don’t you think it would be an extremely bizarre coincidence that women also got the right to vote in canada and half of europe and new zealand etc at the exact same time… and you’re missing the point - the GOP or any party can’t pass some huge amendment like that unless there’s already huge support for it. where did that support come from, all of a sudden all over the western world all at the same time…? and i never characterized women pre wwi as clueless etc - it’s just a fact that new experiences (i.e. new material realities) even short ones (and 2 years is not short) that put people in contact with new people can be enormous catalysts to activating people on ideas and feelings they already have. happens over and over throughout history.
Slavery had a lot of internal contradictions, and that's when the slaves revolted. Feudalism had a lot of internal contradictions, and that's when the serfs revolted. Capitalism has a lot of internal contradictions...
The message is that economic systems change over time due to the amount of internal contradictions, and capitalism won't be any different, hence the elipses points. It won't happen 24/7. Material conditions must be set in order for it to happen in a cohesive manner.
@@funnyguyflips Sure, but that’s a really vague way of looking at things. You’re just saying that there are inherent class conflicts built into hierarchical societies. (“Contradictions” is basically a muddled confusing word for class conflict / conflicts of interest.) That’s correct, but it doesn’t get us anywhere. The class conflicts don’t inherently cause the societies to change or collapse. Hierarchical societies can go on for thousands of years. You have male domination in patriarchal pastoralist societies for millennia and that doesn’t inherently result in women overthrowing the patriarchy automatically over time. Women can and do improve their position in certain circumstances and time and places, but not in others. What I’m doing is looking at where and when there are opportunities that present themselves which facilitate change so that we can take advantage of them as they arise and not sleep through them.
Do you think it could have been possible for humanity to avoid this 12,000 year period of hierarchical society? Could there have been agrarian gender egalitarian societies that slowly progressed into egalitarian industrial society?
i don’t know that it could have happened differently, but I think the conditions are now such that we have choices in the future. I’ll talk aboutit more in future episode but all the tech and computing power and communications technology open up a lot of doors. but there is evidence that civilizations like the indus valley civilization were egalitarian and evolved out of egalitarian agricultural societies. we don’t know for sure but there are many reasons to think that, if you look it up you should find some articles on this. it seems to be more and more of a dominant interpretation of the evidence, but i dont know enough to be able to judge one way or the other.
You sure are a strange mix of materialist and libertarian. In what sense was anarchist Spain stateless? They employed indirect democracy and they were repressive towards counter-revolutionaries. Since they never left the civil war phase, you can always play it down as military conflict but they would still have to repress counter-revolutionaries afterwards. It's clear to me that both scenarios are stateless in the Weberian sense of not laying claim to a monopoly on "legitimate" use of violence, but I'd assume you'd have a materialist definition of statehood in mind, like "carrying out the violence necessary to uphold certain relations of production". EDIT: I guess you could materially define statehood as administrative dominance hierarchy.
like you just noticed at the end, whether anarchist spain was stateless or not depends on your definition of stateless - i haven’t actually decided on a definition yet, i’m going to settle on one when i sit down to do a “what is the state” episode. marx’ and weber’s definitions are good, but i’m not satisfied with either of them. anarchist spain was a state in the marxist sense though if they’d won the war it would have ended up not being one over time. but more importantly, I’d disagree with you about indirect democracy - much of anarchist spain was under direct democratic control via unions and local communes and agricultural coops tied together by various levels of democratic assemblies whose authority flowed upwards vs downwards. this wasn’t always perfect, particularly towards the end when the anarchists had to join the state government, but it was certainly something much more democratic than representative democracy or any other large scale system that i know of. I don’t think repressing counter-revolutionaries really makes it a state necessarily, except in the dictatorship of the proletariat marxist state sense. and yes by that definition, anarchist spain was a dictatorship of the proletariat and peasants.
Anarchism in Spain is an example of the failure of Idealism, rejecting the Popular Front and starting doing the revolution in the middle of the war divided the anti fascist coalition that depended on the support of the republican army (with all the liberals that rejected the coup but were against a revolution), the communist party had the correct analysis, defeating fascism was the priority, the victory of Fascism show why it should be the priority of any leftist, that's why the Soviet Union was one of the few countries that supported republican Spain, since the international communist movement already learned that the defeat of a liberal republic under a fascist government like what happened in Germany Italy and Austria would be negative to any leftist movement. There was no hope of a revolution in Spain, the failure of the revolution in 1934 already show that, when the capitalist used Franco to kill any revolutionary, the only option left was join the Popular Front and defend the capitalist republic against the fascist threat.
well that’s not accurate at all - the anarchists were basically part of the popular front - they eventually even joined the government. it wasn’t division on the left that lost the war, they were simply outgunned. If anything you can blame the the USSR for having crushed the revolution in exchange for soviet weapons, which made the anarchists lose their enthusiasm to fight as vigorously. and there was hope for revolution in spain - it actually happened, except that stalin crushed it before franco even had the chance to do so. a bit similar to what happened in russia in 1918…
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 The USSR send weapons to the popular front, but Spain was not a puppet of the Soviet Union, that was fascist propaganda that said that the popular front, including the liberals were communist, even accusing after the war that the socialist were secret communists, even today they continue to accuse the left of being communist. And in the end the liberal army with the support of the fifth column did a coup that eliminated the socialist and communist resistance and surrendered to Franco.
@@danielsan901998 every single history of the anarchist revolution points out that the USSR insisted that the anarchists dismantle their communes and undid the revolution as a precondition for support. and the anarchists always blamed this for the defeat. the caballero government wasn’t a puppet of the USSR, but they USSR was constantly exerting pressure via it’s military aid in order to push around the government to bendit to its will, including dismantling the revolution. the USSR was against the revolution because they didn’t want to antagonize the west, and also more importantly because a successful revolution in spain would be a huge threat to the ruling party in USSR.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 You are talking as if the capitalist of the republic were in favor of an anarchist revolution, that is false, the USSR was in support of the republican government and against doing a revolution because of that, if there was a revolution the capitalist would have been against it, as already happened in 1934 when the republican government send Franco to kill the revolutionaries. Blaming one of the few countries that supported the republic and ignoring the contradictions of a diverse coalition of capitalist socialist communist and anarchist is just dishonest. You talk about USSR didn’t want to antagonize the west, while ignoring that Spain was part of the west, the republican government was a capitalist government, communist didn’t want to antagonize the government because for them fighting against the fascist was the priority, and they learned that lesson from the failure of the communist germans. And talking about "losing their enthusiasm to fight as vigorously" is just idealism, as Orwell said: “The Trotskyist thesis that the war could have been won if the revolution had not been sabotaged was probably false. To nationalise factories, demolish churches, and issue revolutionary manifestos would not have made the armies more efficient. The fascists won because they were the stronger; they had modern arms and the others hadn’t.”
@@danielsan901998 i never said the republic was for the revolution, quite the opposite, but the only part of the republican side that could actually stop the revolution was the USSR. And when I said “didn’t want to antagonize the west” I mean exactly what you said in the first paragraph. And “losing enthusiasm” is not idealism, it’s rooted in the material fact that without a revolution on the horizon, people don’t fight as hard… I agree with Orwell though - like i said earlier, they lost because they were outgunned. I’m just saying that the anarchists always blamed the USSR. I imagine the USSR made it worse, but that ultimately the stronger force won.
ooh yes, i keep wanting to put that in, but it never fits - i’ll probably do it when I do a full episode on animal politics - but here’s an article about it - the alpha males in a troupe all died from hogging food which was contaminated, and then the rest of the males created a kinder gentler baboon society, and made sure that immigrating males also conformed to their new ‘ideology’ www.science.org/content/article/kinder-gentler-baboon
Materialism isn't even a thing. Because various people believe that all sorts of things have material influences on other things. In such a situation how do we go about discovering what actually has empirical effects? We investigate what actual causes are: empirically. Empiricism involves observation and experiment, getting quantitative (numerical) results which can allow us to predict future outcomes. In constrast: materialism, too often, involves making stuff up; it is only interested in qualitative findings - which cannot be used to discover any 'laws' - be they laws of physics or laws of society. This is because materialism allows one too many degrees of freedom. Materialism based on empiricism is good. But in "social sciences", materialism is often based on long-winded, pseudo-logic; which can easily be false logic. Because too little effort is put into screening out bias, as the narrator has too many degrees of freedom to fit facts to their preferred narrative. Materialism has been one of the great problems of Marxism. Marxist scholars often argue with each other based on who has the correct "class analysis". They should be arguing over what are the actual material drivers in a particular scenario - to discover that one should investigate empirically. But a 'Marxist understanding' allows one to just 'know' based on one's apriori education in Marxism. The dialectic is the other disaster which drove Marxism out of step with reality. Combine the two: to get the materialist dialectic - then you have a formula for using qualitative facts, which one has subconsciously cherry-picked, to invent a narrative of history.
you’re just throwing out the baby with the bathwater. yes you’re right it’s not a perfect science an a lot of people (i.e. marxism) abuse it to foolish extremes, but just to throw it away entirely for that reason is idiotic. do you agree that prices rise when demand is scarce? well, that’s materialism. should we throw that away because we can’t perfectly determine how prices will rise each time or how demand will change to predict the exact price in given conditions? no, we use it because it’s just a general guide to human behaviour and helps us understand what incentives are and how they work so we can try to make some general predictions. the more complicated the situation, the worse the predictions will be, but if you’re not thinking about the incentives built into conditions, you can’t make laws that work the way you want them to, you can’t do negotiations, you can’t do anything.
The Spanish civil war wasn't even close. - The nationalists had the entire professional army -They had the full support of two whole fascist countries, Germany and Italy. Attributing it to people being demotivated by the dismantlement of anarcho-socialism isn't particularly convincing.
i agree that the republican side most likely lost because the fascist side was just stronger over all - but by all accounts the fact that the communists forces the anarchists to dismantle the revolution did demotivate the anarchist fighters and most likely caused the republicans to lose faster as a result
Some autocomplete for the algorithm: lol lol i dont have to be careful about the video of your dad lol i dont lol i just remembered that I was going on a walk to the park north park east north park park north park east north park park
This was a fantastic episode! Also probably one of the best brief coverages of the CNT-FAI during the Spanish Civil War on UA-cam!
thank you, this is much appreciated! especially coming from you!
so maddening to see how they sabotaged the anarchist project in Catalunia, malditos estalinistas
Awesome, two favourite UA-camrs sharing praise about my fav topic
35:33 King Richard class quote
Such a great episode! I know the view count is still unfairly low, but when the content is this good you are still making a genuine difference to 100s or 1000s of people’s world views. So thanks for the videos☺️
thank you, i really appreciate that! that would be amazing if people change their thinking because of this stuff. if you’re active in any online communities please share it if appropriate. the only way i have to share it is on reddit, and more and more subs are blocking people from promoting their own videos unless they’re active users and i dont have time to be randomly active online aside from this stuff!
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 I’m not super active anywhere tbh but I have a few friends that are interested by this so I’ve sent it to them
@@lw14robbie31 thank you, it’s appreciated!
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 what's the source for the "communists ironically dismantled the socialist project, it was better to lose spain to the fascists" part?
@@VocalBear213 basically any history of the revolution - the one i cited for this episode was Dolgoff Anarchist Collectives, or more recently I read Loren 2016, Revolution, Defeat and Theoretical Underdevelopment, there’s a chapter on the revolution you can get for free on libcom - stalin insisted on pushing back the revolution because it was scaring countries like france or england that he wanted to curry favour with, so the spanish stalinists did so as soon as they had the chance. but it’s commonly thought that (and it makes 100% sense to me) that for the USSR the fact that there was actual worker control over industry and agriculture without the party control that existed in the USSR and without the war on peasants that they had there, that this was an existential threat to the whole legitimacy of their rule. stalin wasn’t sayin “we must crush the anarchists, it’s a threat to our power” but it surely must have been part of the motivation in my view, even if unconsciously
You are a genius. This content is amazing. You have taught me more in a few episodes than I’ve learned in months. Cannot thank you enough.
thank you! don’t take my word for this stuff though, check out the bibliography!
Whoo, new episode. Here's a comment for our inscrutable god, the content algorithm.
praise be s/he! thanks!
This has within few days become my favourite youtube channel or infact online resource of all time. So grateful.
It’s just mind-boggling how this history is distorted in school to obscure the real causes of societal change
As a Hegelian I have to say that I'm in love with your channel even thought I feel like this particular video issue is even more complicated than you've shown. You are nonetheless extremely underrated and I can't figure out why!
thank you - what’s your criticism about this episode?
Seriously, your channel is so underrated! Great video as always!
thank you! let people know about it if you can!
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 For sure! I will bother Vaush discord to check you out :D
I love that the algorithm is now recommending your videos to me by itself without me having to go on your channel to see if you posted some things I missed!
Wow, this was fantastic! I just stumbled upon your channel and am VERY impressed with the quality of your content. You deserve wayyy more views and subscribes, and I hope this comment can help you get more algorithmic love. Keep up the great work!
thank you, love to hear it! share it if you can!
Regarding the slave revolt in Haiti.......some (including Marcus Garvey Jr.) attribute its success to the fact that a large percentage of the slaves were from the same locale in Africa......and thus could communicate readily with each other.
The slave traders' practice after Haiti was to assure that their human "goods" were from different regions, and spoke different languages.
makes sense
Keep making videos like this, please. Topics such as philosophy, law, history, and politics are often disregarded by most people (unless they major in or currently study said topics), which results in low views as compared to “fun” content, but we need more educational videos. I learned more about politics from you and the books I currently have than from the years I spent at an academic institution.
I’ve only just watched this video. As usual, it was full of information and ideas that were completely new to me - clearly presented. And fun! Thank you!
thank you!
Awesome! So glad to see your new episode and I love your stuff.
A fun example of a materialist interpretation of human action is road traffic. At the macroscopic scale, it is traditionally modelled using fluid dynamics equations. This breaks down when there's an accident, for example, not in the lane where the accident has occurred (a blockage is a blockage, after all), but in the other lane(s), especially the one(s) travelling in the opposite direction, because water molecules aren't known for rubbernecking.
What is your point? I'm not following.
@@matt7754 The point was simply that sometimes what seems like a rational actor-type decision at one level of analysis can be modelled as a purely material one at another level (admittedly, using the word "material" there more in the "rational materialist" sense).
Great video as always.
I think it's interesting that you brought up the topic of anarchism and the future of industrial civilization but for a completely different reason than I would. Basically, I don't see any other plausible outcome to our current predicament of interconnected environmental, economic and social problems except some sort of a societal collapse, and I think the collapse has already started in a lot of places, such as America. Societal collapse is a process of simplification of a complex society, in our case a decades-long process of some degree of deindustrialization, economic and population decline and a return to a more localized society. For details, I recommend the podcast Breaking Down: Collapse. We have a lot of influence over what the collapse looks like exactly and the best-case scenario is a planned degrowth with some qualitative improvements in our lives.
Because of my belief in collapse, I think there's a very good chance that anarchism will become a major political force in the coming decades. I think it's likely that GDP will go into a permanent decline within this decade, and that in these conditions, the only ideologies that thrive are fascism and various forms of socialism. Anarchism is highly compatible with the degrowth movement, and the sort of crises that come with a relatively uncontrolled collapse also provide very good conditions for anarchism.
i don’t have a dogmatic position on the future, but unfortunately you may be right about collapse. and yes it could potentially lead to conditions favourable to positive changes (like the black plague was) but it could also lead to the opposite. conditions of scarcity are usually not very good for egalitarianism. i’ll check out that podcast when i have some time, thanks
What is the functional difference between fascism and other forms of socialism ?
This one is eye-opening. Thank you for your hard work!
You've taught me a lot about FAI and how revolutions happen :)
I FEEL BLESSED TO HAVE FOUND YOUR CHANNEL !! ❤❤❤❤❤❤
Yes! New Epsiode. Love this show.
What are the best books to read to get an introduction to anarchist Spain? Particularly to how decision-making worked?
“anarchist collectives” by dolgoff is an anthology of participant accounts of everything from agriculture to decisionmaking - im sure there are more recent books that are great, but that was my big intro
When I was an undergrad, one of the big questions I was interested in was what were the material factors that led to revolutions. Some of my professors said it was when people had nothing to lose; others said it was when people had something to lose, usually property.
Since then, I think I've began to lean more towards an idealist perspective because no real social revolutions happen without ideas fueling them. People have to be pushed forward by intellectuals, otherwise they just end up as petty squabbles. The masses tend to be unresponsive and conservative until their property and livelihood are threatened, but it usually takes someone crystallizing these concerns and making them conscious of it for anything to actually come to fruition. Thus, populist aggrandizers are the biggest catalyst in my opinion, but material conditions are also a factor, making the material and idea dichotomy a false one. I also think that applies to ontology, but that's a different topic altogether
well it’s like i say in the video, in more complex societies often material conditions change and it takes time for consciousness to catch up and for people to realize that the balance of power has changed in their favour, and once they do they can take action. but yes, materialism is simply the context in which agency is exercised.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Yeah that's where my main critique lies with Marx; his ideas only apply to western societies.
I'm unsure what time zone you live in, but thanks for the late night replies
Have you worked much with counter power tactics ?
@@luciennoxisou9502 I can't say that I have. Could you describe it for me?
Your channel is a gift to this world.
Much needed discussion....more and more needed the way things are going.
Your analysis is so clear and illuminating THANKS
thank you!
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 This debate is typically American : Europeans, as I am, think Americans are crazy not wanting social security because it could be restricting their freedom and so on. So from
my point of view what you are saying is very clear. The problem now, is that since the fall of the Berlin Wall, European politics is going in that same direction and more and more people are fooled my this kind of reasoning. Thanks to give a clear voice to a more realistic and scientific way of analyze our society. It's a delight to hear someone telling what I thought but never express in a articulate way.
@@cristinadeperfetti7566 i think americans actually do want those things - according to polls most of them do - but they don’t actually think it’s possible, and the political system is so corrupt that no one even offers them those things. and i think its similar for europe - the economic powers are so strong that they prevent governments from expanding welfare states and are slowly destroying them. people see everything continually deteriorating regardless of who is in power, so they don’t believe anything better is possible.
Just in case it wasn't mentioned, there is also the Asturias Commune in 1934, which lasted only around two weeks, but was an actual independence from the Spanish government, they even minted their own coins. This rebellion was violently quashed by Franco later and was partically the reason he eventually rose to power. To some, the Civil War started in 1934 with this revolt, just to show how threatening it appeared to the entire country, partially because of the Asturian miners, who were capable of extreme cohesion, had posession of weapons and explosives, and valuable resources such as coal. However, I should also note that the republican side in the civil war had massive dissorganization issues (mostly because all the non-marine military joined Franco's side, until the soviet communists brought instructors to teach the militias in warfare and establishing some military discipline), to the point where it was referred to as a "hydra biting itself".
Don't know if it's relevant, and I might have missed some details, but I thought it would help your materialism argument: It was the area with the proper conditions for a worker revolution (mostly in Euskadi and Asturias being prominent industrial centers and with important comercial ports) that cause such a revolt first, and then it was squashed. When the civil war started, the northern area was the first to be attacked because they knew it had the potential and conditions to do so again: The military campaign took those conditons into account, eliminated them, and it's why they were eventually victorious, by seizing the thigns that made the revolts possible in the first place.
very good info thanks - yes that’s very relevant!
Outstanding video as always. Looking forward to the Q&A!
thank you! me too, especially because it’s way less work to put together!
Hii, i just wanted to say thank you so much for this episode with so many great examples. I had never heard of that part of Spain's history and it was so interesting! I especially wanted to thank you for the insight on the suffragette movement as it inspired some of my ideas in my latest video (I mention your podcast in it for credit:D) thank you for ur work, i can only imagine how much time these videos must take!
thank you! lots of this stuff is stuff people really need to know! i’ll have to check out your show when i have the time! and yes, the really complicated ones can take 6 months or more … but usually they take 2-3 months
While I agree with basically everything in this video, I think there are 2 glaring blind spots.
1.) Concerning women's suffrage. Woman getting the right to vote as a direct result of WW1 is a compelling argument that I would agree with. It provided a great step forward in giving women access to political power, but that alone did not produce gender equality. Women weren't allowed to have a personal bank account until 1974, 30 years after WW2. That is too big of a gap for me to say that WW2 was the most significant factor for that turning point in history. An important factor, but not the most significant.
The most significant factor in women joining the workforce and gaining more economic and political power was largely due to economic shifts rather than a direct consequence of WW2. The conditions post WW1 for and post WW2 were largely the same, so why did it take so long for things to change? Given that men are on average, bigger, stronger and faster, when it comes to the manual labor market, women would not be able to compete on even ground. They would not have the same degree of bargaining power and did not until several technological advancements. Things like the dish washer, laundry machine and vacuum cleaner meant that home economics was easier than ever. Other inventions also opened up for more sedentary jobs that women could perform as well men at if not out perform. Growing corporations realized that half of the developed world's potential workforce wasn't working and that they had jobs to fill, so they launched a massive marketing campaign to help women's suffrage along. Second wave feminism, I would argue, was only possible through the convergence of economic interests with the interests of a social movement. It would not have happened otherwise as men would have the money and power to prevent it from ever happening.
Two household incomes also provided an economic advantage. Families with two incomes would have a raised standard of living and could invest more money in their children to ensure they continued to have a raised standard of living for future generations. Also, since the market had more cash flow due to some families having more disposable income, prices rose. These factors forced more women to enter the workforce to maintain the same standard of living. Even more disposable income meant prices rose even more. Until we get to today's economy where two household incomes are not only the norm, but a necessity. Which is good for women's rights, don't get me wrong. But it also means that a single income is no longer enough to support a family or sometimes even an individual. Elizabeth Warren literally wrote the book on this "The Two Income Trap." Where price inflation due to doubling the income of a household results in the poorest, particularly black families, being shit on the hardest. We doubled household income without fixing prices which means the rich are a lot richer and the poor are a lot poorer than they were 50 years ago. 2nd wave feminism was a business maneuver much more than a civil rights movement. The solution is not social regression, but regulated pricing when it comes to food, healthcare and housing. Otherwise, no matter how much you raise the minimum wage, you'll never get any richer as corporations can raise prices to take whatever disposable income you have left.
2.) Concerning racial civil rights. Again, the fact that the 60's civil rights movement was set into motion so late after the end of WW2 makes me think that was not the most significant factor. An important one, yes, but maybe not the most important. I would argue the Soviet Union played just as important a roll for progressing American Civil rights as WW2.
What really got me thinking about this was reading about the assassination of Fred Hampton. Fred Hampton was explicitly a Marxist who succeeded not only in gathering support from blacks, but also poor whites and latinos. He called it the Rainbow Coalition and was making progress in turning the civil rights movement into a multi-ethnic movement against poverty and economic inequality. Which makes sense. You cannot have social equality without economic equality. Many other civil rights leaders had socialist ideals as well. Even Martin Luther King. Which also made me wonder why I'd never learned about those speeches in school. The simple answer being: it was more profitable that we didn't.
The Soviet Union is well documented in using US civil rights struggles in their propaganda, which really ramped up in the 60's. They hoped this could 1) be used to degrade US favorability in the eyes of other countries and 2) to fuel conflict internally in the US. Not only that, but the mere existence of the USSR provided a viable alternative to American capitalism and hope for a socialist revolution to succeed.
Today, the wage gap between blacks and whites is wider now than it was 50 years ago. While social progress may have improved margionally, economic progress has halted which has also halted economic progress. The civil rights movement is only half complete and the half we got was black capitalism. Fred Hampton was assassinated by the FBI because US political and economic interests were genuinely afraid of communist revolution on US soil. They were afraid of Fred Hampton, or someone like him, becoming a "black messiah." Fred Hampton, a chairman of the black panthers, was uniting poor folks of all races and backgrounds under one banner. So he had to die.
If US power structures have the power to socially engineer people into thinking a wedding is worthless without a diamond, that breakfast cereal is good for you and that black socialism never happened, why did they let the civil rights movement succeed at all? It happened because those in power saw it as the best way to maintain or increase their power. Corporations and politicians saw black lead socialism as a genuine threat to their power so they coopted it and mutated it into black capitalism to reinforce their power instead. And what do we have to show for it? A couple black billionaires, some more black folks on TV and not much else. Black folks are still the most incarcerated, murdered and poorest demographic along with latin folks and natives.
The civil rights movement happened because it was the convergence of economic interests with social interests. And the reason so little has changed in 50 years is because the US no longer has a rival to push it to be better. China might compete with the US and other western countries in terms of economic power, but they are far behind on social issues. The US existing puts more pressure on China for social reform than the other way around.
But what really scares me though, is as our technological power increases, governments and corporations may use that power to influence our thoughts and opinions on a scale most people can't even imagine much less articulate. All it would take for a channel like this to die is an algorithm tweak. If youtube decided "socialism" were a dirty word on a whim, would future generations ever be able to develop the tools to step out from under the boot of oppression? If google controls the search results for 70% of the internet, they can effectively decide what's fact and fiction. Government agencies can and have infiltrated radical movements to dismantle them from the inside. We are quickly approaching a socioeconomic state from which there is no escape. We may even already be there.
i think that the factors you’re describing are important, but i wouldn’t call them “glaring blind spots” - this isn’t a comprehensive video about how people got these rights, i’m just trying to show the material influences on things. ANd don’t underestimate the importance of the world wars. the wars were a huge factor, and historically are routinely a huge factor in the advancement of rights of average people, increasing their bargaining power. Athenian democracy comes from wars for example.
Would love to see your take on Rojava! A modern use of your analysis style would be very helpful!
Ooh, good idea, maybe i’ll do a whole episode on that, or talk about it a bit when i do a proper episode on what happened in spain
Also Rojava , The Syrian Kurds, their political system is based in Murray Bookchin concepts
yes - i didn’t know enough about it in details as i’ve read conflicting reports so i didn’t get into it, but yes very interesting
This is amazing content. This really opened my eyes as a leftist and social worker who is pretty interested and privy to such analysis but it was completely eye opening and enlightening to learn about the material conditions and succeeding contingencies that gave rise to our current condition. It’s funny too how the hierarchies discussed so far led to the eventual conditions where much of our current understanding of history and the men who documented/theorized/analyzed history were for a long time, (and probably still are today) unable to grasp this and thus tended to rationalize things in a way that rationalized the systems in place.
Just curious, and assuming that you probably oppose neoliberal capitalism to sone extent and fall somewhere on the hard left, what do you suppose the best possible strategy would be to distrust capital/create the conditions necessary for socialism (or whatever you specifically see as a political goal)? If these conditions were achieved what do you think that would look like? Also this is extremely random, but I’m curious and really like your analysis... how do you feel about Georgism in conjunction with more anarchical/bottom up organization, and I guess just generally being implemented as a means to achieve market socialism? I used to think it was so dumb, but I honestly didn’t fully understand it. As a transition option, I think it makes so much more sense than Marx and Engels’ voucher/lower phase proposal. I think in terms of opulence it appeals to a larger scale of stake holders than most existing communist transition strategies, it has very few losers, it would disrupt our current system and allow us to shift the collective perspective further left without requiring so much revolution that it is just disrupting people, period. It promotes equality and at least IMO, would be able to address the inherent opposition the current system in the US has to the preservation of the environment and other living organisms. I am fairly radical and especially after learning about bargaining power and it’s impact on egalitarian organization I ultimately would like to see the “classless moneyless society”, but also I don’t think that will happen while I’m alive and I don’t think it will happen in a smooth and ethical way using the strategies tried thus far. However, I feel like earth is a ticking time bomb and capitalism is eating itself- so trying to slowly reform our way there, and exhausting insane amounts of energy for the possibility of raising the minimum wage, unionizing Amazon, or student loan relief seems like.... not a viable long term goal on its own lol. Though at the same time, circle jerking about theory online with no direction or game plan for meaningful praxis isn’t productive either. So I’m just curious what you think, and if you have any particular positions or ideas.
This channel is seriously criminally undersubscribed though. I’ll recommend it, and I have been trying to find a way to relate one of the episodes to a class I GA for- I plan on working with this professor again for my final semester when he’ll teach practice and policy to the first year MSWs, and one hundred percent want to use your explanation of political terminology and the importance of using and understanding language in political discourse. I’m sure these take a ton of time and research.
Sorry to ramble, and I know those are kind of big questions, but i really want to focus on this area in my activism more and get a wider range of ideas to build off of. Thanks again!
Hi! Thank you, I very much appreciate your comments and supportive words. They do take a lot of time, that’s why it usually takes me 3 months to put one out! Please do let people know about this.
I don’t know enough about Georgism, and I don’t adhere to a very specific program as *the* route out of capitalism, but I think the guiding principle should always be that those who are affected by decisions should have a say in those decisions in proportion to how much they’re affected, and no one should have exclusive control or ownership of anything that other people depend on to live.
So workers should manage their own workplaces, but consumers and local area where the businesses are located should also have a say in what’s produced and how etc, and eventually everything should be like one big cooperative, with resources managed by networks of local, regional cooperatives etc.
I imagine the route to that is probably something like the “democracy at work” movement, and that would evolve into broader socialism over time vs competing in a market system. I think most people, whether they have a liberal or conservative bent, understand that there’s something inherently unjust in some people having power over others, and believe that people affected by decisions should have a say in them, so that the key is putting out these messages in language that everyone can relate to and understand, and to get people to realize that if all the people who believed in these principles got together we’d have enormous power to not only change things, but prevent our total destruction.
Easier said than done, but I think that things are moving naturally in this direction, but there needs to be a bit of clarifying the muddle of political language in very simple and clear concepts, and distilling and breaking political problems into “most of the bad things we hate happen because some people are allowed to control resources that others depend on to live, and those people make all the decisions for everyone else without being subject the consequences” and that injecting this into the discourse will give our politics a much greater focus, cohesion and appeal to a broad public vs a small circle jerk of educated types.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 thanks for your quick response!
Fully agree with you in that it should be wholistic- workers tend to and collectively own their workplace/means of production, and the rest of the community holds stake regarding the goods and services. For instance if me and my friends decide to open a smoothie shop, we would exchange schedules and decide on our hours, establish our by-laws, divy up the mundane tasks, etc... then engage with the community and see what types of smoothies they like, any special dietary restrictions to consider, ask them to weigh in on our bylaws and systems, etc.
I fully agree that when it comes to bargaining power, a few rotten applies poison the whole bunch. And I would go as far as to say once a power imbalance is established, future generations of the actors in power will begin to rationalize and justify their privilege. Take chattel slavery- it’s not natural or very comfortable psychologically to acknowledge that your economic interests require you to absolutely dehumanize, objectify, exploit and often torture other human beings, and to empathize with them human to human. So we get people measuring the shapes of skulls, and creating an entire pseudoscientific fields of nonsense in an attempt to argue a given group of people are inherently less human- that it’s just in their blood to be subordinate and loyal like a sheep dog or something, and it would in fact be wrong and a recipe for disaster for them to exist in any other way.
It becomes difficult when much of the current class conflict is so deeply vested in white supremacy, patriarchy, and imperialism that is packaged with dozens of excuses and narratives that reinforce them. But I believe even more so after looking into the anthropological evidence that this isn’t necessarily a natural or even ideal condition for humanity to flourish under.
I definitely think these talking points are relevant to my masters students and program overall- I can pretty easily relate those sentiments to even the basic NASW code of ethics and core values and build off of that into whatever concepts for praxis people come up with or connect with, instead of coming immediately jumping into “remember kids leftism not liberalism!” and losing people or making it uncomfortable political but also will make future discussion about political terminology and stepping away from centrist language and thinking easier.
Thank you for all your responses! I know Georgism was oddly specific but it’s kinda polarizing, yet has a very materialistic and egalitarian basis so I think it’s worth entertaining and there’s a lot of interesting directions it can take in this context. I’ll have to continue researching and seeing how it works with other framework. Have a great weekend !
@@sad-qy7jz if there’s a good quick overview of georgism that you recommend let me know, i’ll look at it. check out episodes 7 and 6 of this show if you haven’t btw, i cover some of the themes you’re talking about, anthropology of egalitarianism and hierarchy and i go into how for example a bargaining power advantage for men over women due to specific conditions turns into patriarchal ideology over time. i’ll be elaborating a lot on that sort of thinking in upcoming episodes. great weekend to you too!
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 can I post links in comments? I’ll edit it with a couple of the decent overviews and leftist applications among the rare few- since were so used to the idea of “tax” and “land” together alluding to private property or sone giant purchase to deforest and build factories on and keep the profits for yourself, the atlas shrugged fanboy type tend to just take it out of context and ignore 90% of the original ideas. Plus it usually is brought up as a solution to “sAvE CApiTalism” or as something entirely different way of forming a polity that transcends left and right (which simply isn’t true or even possible). I have a few papers, articles and videos where this stupid misconception doesn’t muddle it I can link or just post the citations so you they can be searched up.
The single land tax seems like a really good way of addressing the hoarding of resources and the ability for capitalists, land lords, politicians, city planners, etc to profit from holding onto land and exploring workers and tenants as well as profiting from destroying nature. It would incentives people who will use and respect the land to instead use it. And since it applies to literally just basically all land, nature, systems etc that make up the land, it would no longer make sense for companies to cut corners or compete in ways that lead to pollution, natural devastation, or the destruction of wildlife habitats because you would have to pay for the damages to the land and things on it (trees, glaciers, animals, people affected by the changes to biosphere).
Henry George’s overall strategy really addresses the problems with allowing hierarchy and leveraging power to emerge. This is a resllt great quote from him that sums this up fairly well; “The tax upon land values is, therefore, the most just and equal of all taxes. It falls only upon those who receive from society a peculiar and valuable benefit, and upon them in proportion to the benefit they receive. It is the taking by the community, for the use of the community, of that value which is the creation of the community. It is the application of the common property to common uses. When all rent is taken by taxation for the needs of the community, then will the equality ordained by Nature be attained. No citizen will have an advantage over any other citizen save as is given by his industry, skill, and intelligence; and each will obtain what he fairly earns. Then, but not till then, will labor get its full reward, and capital its natural return”. Besides ensuring citizens’ dividends or lifetime salaries, it seems like great conditions to reorganize labor more like co-ops or council syndicates. I’ll edit this with readings and sources that I think explain it will thoufh, and if you don’t have urls disabled I can share that too.
Looking forward for more though! If you get around to checking any out (no pressure!) would love your thoughts and criticism. I’m not married to it, and see it as a way to transition out of capitalism that could probably make (almost) everyone happy who wouldn’t even consider anything with the c word, but I think anarchy and mutualism are ideal.
EDIT:
Georgism wiki:
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
Ecotax wiki:
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecotax
LVT wiki:
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
Tragedy of the Commons Wiki:
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
Mexie has great insight to ToTCand the more environmental side of things. She has a rundown of ToTC that I think suffices Wikipedia.
There’s another podcast called “acid horizon”- lol I know what you’re thinking based on the name, it’s a little post modern/heavy crit theory but still it has a lot of relevant episodes and the professional guests are amazing. I’ll link the channels shortly
So Henry George’s own series Progress and Poverty is obviously your best source, straight for the horses mouth. Obviously, just like Marx but perhaps more glaringly, there’s certain things that you probably would rather change or do away with or that need to be adjusted per the conditions of 2021.
“Barton, S. E. Berkeley Mayor J. Stitt Wilson’s 1911 Synthesis of Socialism, Georgism and Feminism”. (This paper should be free and accessible to anyone but I’ll post a link to the PDF if I can) Obviously I don’t fully embrace the authors’ positions but the critique, overview and points are relevant and there is some compelling information.
(Link the PDF): www.researchgate.net/profile/Stephen-Barton/publication/263770987_Berkeley_Mayor_J_Stitt_Wilson's_1911_Synthesis_of_Socialism_Georgism_and_Feminism/
“ Cleveland, M. M. (2012). The economics of Henry George: a review essay. American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 71(2), 498-511.”
I’m just realized the one originally had hear isn’t as valuable as I thought and this adjacent professor’s essay/critical review are much better time spent.
( the PDF):
cooperative-individualism.org/cleveland-mary_review-of-phillip-bryson-the-economics-of-henry-george-2012-apr.pdf
“Cui, Z. (2011). Partial intimations of the coming whole: the Chongqing experiment in light of the theories of Henry George, James Meade, and Antonio Gramsci. Modern China, 37(6), 646-660.” This one is fantastic actually I just started reading it but I haven’t finished yet. I do think the access is restricted but if you’re actively any academia you should have access if you search it through your institutions database or homepage.
Here’s the link, but for anyone else reading it’ll request access or make you pay. students can just log into whatever portal you use or your university library and it should work fine :
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0097700411420852
The wiki pages for both Georgism and LVT have some pretty useful intro info and some decent sources to follow up on though I haven’t like sat down and read the entirety of each one.
The channel “unlearning economics” (would absolutely recommend too!!!) leftist econ prof gave a quick but extremely clear and unique leftist explanation in his recent Q&A and has talked about it in conjunction with co-ops before. There’s a few pretty good videos explaining it as a 10-20 min rundown that aren’t confused ancaps for a quick summary, which I’m happy to link if anyone else is curious if I can. Another similar channel, Mexie, environmental studies/Econ prof did a video with Unlearning as well where they kinda get into LVT and some of the stuff I’m primarily getting at.
I would go for at least a synopsis of Progress of Poverty though (ideally the books themselves but if not feasible) if you really want to kind of get what it entails and it’s potential. At least a synopsis before the other papers, just to identify liberalized interpretations. There’s a few indie papers or student papers that take the leftist framing further which although are at the graduate level and seem to be sourced, I would rather check all the sources before sharing it.
I’ll link mexie, UE, and whoever else I mentioned in five or ten... If I scrambled anything by mistake I’m so sorry and shall proof read after work it .
@@sad-qy7jz thanks! i’ll check out the unlearning economics and the check out progress of poverty if interested - did you post links btw? because if you did they didn’t appear
This was amazing! I'd love to learn more about these episodes in particular and materialism in general. Can you recommend any books on the 1381 English peasant revolt and the anarchists in Spain? And is there any good books that offer an overview of materialism?
for the spanish anarchists a nice into is Anarchist Collectives by Sam Dolgoff which is a collection of eyewitness and participant reports. there’s a lot of stuff on libcom.org as well. For 1381 the books tend to be very short because the sources are sparse and all from the point of view of the nobility, but the one I remember is When Adam Delved and Eve Span by Mark O’Brien, but there are a bunch of others, maybe more detailed - and there’s a very entertaining lecture by SWP leader Paul Foot from the early 80s that you can find on youtube (the links are actually all in the show notes!)
" one of the most important episodes in history". That's how I see it too. However we also have to be critical when we talk about it. Take for example Mujeres libres. Mary Nash has a book about it. It's basically collection of their writings from the time. They tried to apply to the regional committee of CNT-FAI to be officially recognised as a part of the libertarian movement. They were rejected with explanation that female organisation would divide movement, created inequality, with unrepairable damages to working class. This is not to say that that didn't cooperated, they most certainly did, but patriarchy was still big at that time. They faced many problems dealing with man both on individual and organisational level.
Of course this doesn't diminish great achievements that revolution made.
Anyway just a good faith criticism from left perspective.
Regarding free will it's a long debate and I'm no expert, but recently I read good book about it: " Behave" from Sapolsky. I'm leaning towards his conclusion that there isn't free will when it comes to our most important actions. Interesting read so check it out.
Anyway great video, well researched and was pleasure watching
thanks, yes for sure, sexism was still important but it was surprising how advanced they were becoming for the time. i'll have to read up on this when i do a proper full episode or series on the spanish anarchists to include this - its hard to include all the details when covering something very broadly like in this episode, this was just a quick overview! I will check out sapolsky i was just reading him about baboons!
This is excellent. IMO your most important video so far. I hope it spreads far and wide! I will definitely be sharing.
I have some questions and comments...
9:55: Ideal beauty age for women in Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) cultures (at least traditionally) is late 30s and 40s.
This makes me happy. Source? (Searched and couldn't find)
38:30: "For the first time in the industrialized world, people successfully replaced the existing political economic and cultural hierarchies of the day with a system of radical democracy economic equality and even a high degree of gender equality."
Perhaps not the gender equality thing, but I believe the rest was achieved to some degree in Russia Feb 1917 to Oct 1917 (revolutionary period before Bolsheviks took power) and Ukraine free territory (facilitated by the Makhnovists) 1918-1921
41:30 "anarchists organized massive labor unions with millions of members"
Not quite: At its peak the CNT had 1.5 million members.
46:24 "anarchist self-government wasn't just limited to the workplace or the farm or the economic sphere local regional and federal deliberative bodies were formed where people could speak and vote and formulate general policy decisions from lower bodies went up to an executive whose job was to put into action what the lower bodies wanted"
Hmm... are you sure? What sorts of policy decisions are you talking about?
From what I've read, there were such bodies at the local level in villages, these were village assemblies. But beyond the local level, I think federations only existed for economic issues, such as coordinating development projects or mutual aid. There were also federations within the unions for decision making, and this is where things spanned both economic as well as non-economic political decisions. As far as I know there were no federations for non-local political decision making outside the unions.
If I'm wrong please tell me the source that discusses this; I'd love to be wrong about this and I'd love to learn more!
Unless you're talking about the Council of Aragon? My memory of this is fuzzy but I think it still wouldn't fit your description.
47:53 "it was the supposed communists on the republican side who were controlled by the soviet union who squelched the revolution"
True, and they were the worst offenders. But don't forget the Republicans and "Socialists" in government who were also counterrevolutionary
48:53 "anarchist soldiers workers and peasants lost much of their zeal dedication and emotional investment in the war effort. Production slowed..."
Production slowed for many reasons, such as the economic blockade on international trade, destruction of industry by bombing, loss of labor to the military effort. I'd guess that loss of morale would be a significant but not the dominant factor.
(Forget where this is mentioned) Federations of village communes and industrial federations overcoming competition
This was true to some degree, but market competition was not entirely eliminated. But I trust that had the revolution had more time to develop, and wasn't being sabotaged and attacked by the counterrevolutionary "Communists", "Socialists", Republicans, and finally fascists, that market competition would have been completely overcome within a few more years.
Thanks! And thanks for the input and corrections! As this was a general overview of things I’ve known about for a long time, a lot of the stuff in this particular episode was from memory with a little review to refresh my memory - so I might have gotten some things wrong - normally I’d check all your corrections, but I just don’t have time right now so if you have some sources to show where I made mistakes, please send them and I’ll address it all in the upcoming QnA episode - needless to say when I do proper episodes on each subject I will be reading extensively.
My description on the origins of feudalism was I think the most off - what I said was correct for some places but not the general situation.
One big thing I missed is that the Haudenosaunee were an important inspiration for the american suffragettes! I read about it after I published this episode.
For the haudenosaunee women cultural ideal age being 30s and early 40s:
This is something I’ve heard a few times over the years, probably just from the mouths of native people - I *think* most recently I heard it from a law professor who spoke at a bar association presentation last year - she also said there was no rape in the 5 nations, which I’ve also heard before. When I was writing the script for the episode I looked, but like you I couldn’t find anything to confirm it - I put it in anyways because I’d heard it a couple of times over the years.
For your corrections, most of what you said I think is right but a few things I’m not sure:
You’re right about Russia and Ukraine, I should have mentioned that. I think what sets Spain apart is that the anarchists controlled such large urban and rural territories, where in Russia it was certain workplaces and industries and the soviet deliberative bodies were competing with the parliament at the same time so they didn’t have exclusive control.
With Ukraine I know they controlled a large territory, but did they actually abolish wage labour and collectivize most of the industries and agriculture the way they did in spain?
Again I’ll want to do a full episode on this and will have to re-lean about it in detail, I think I was 19 when I read about the Maknovschina
I assume you’re right about CNT numbers, but if gave an actual number or range of numbers I must have read it somewhere - maybe there were millions of workers and peasants in all the anarchist organizations? I know there were 7 mil + people in the anarchist territories.
For the anarchist assemblies, again I was going off memory, but I do remember specifically reading a bunch of stuff about huge organizations spanning across the anarchists zones where anyone could participate in decisions beyond economics in a manner similar to the early soviets, but more organized - one example of non economic decisions that the mass of people participated in is was whether or not the FAI-CNT would participate directly in the republican government with ministers, rather than in parallel outside the government.
Wasn’t the whole point of the FAI political decision-making and the CNT unions economic decision-making (hence the FAI-CNT as the ultimate organization)?
You tell me!
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Hi! You're right that the revolution in Spain went much further than in Russia or Ukraine. But I think the achievements in these earlier cases are enough that they deserved a nod.
Hmm... my guess is that the "millions" number you were thinking of is the number workers and peasants who participated in collectivized self-managed industry or village communes.
"one example of non economic decisions that the mass of people participated in is was whether or not the FAI-CNT would participate directly in the republican government with ministers, rather than in parallel outside the government."
This was a decision made within the CNT, I believe it was at a plenary involving hundreds of CNT delegates who'd been mandated by their local CNT branches/chapters. So it was not a decision open to the masses of people, just those in the CNT. (Of course this particular decision, of whether the CNT should join the government, is not a decision that non-CNT members should be involved in.)
Arguably one of the weaknesses of the Spanish revolution is that it didn't develop soviets or workers councils, bringing together delegates of workers on a non-sectarian basis for industrial self-management and political self-governance, as happened in Russia and, to lesser degrees, other historical cases of mass working-class uprisings, and ironically this weakness was due to the strength of its unions as an organizing force. Workers generally continued to organize through their unions, as these were the pre-existing structures, so of the worker self-managed enterprises, you'd have CNT-controlled sections of industry and UGT-controlled sections of industry. And outside of the state itself, political decision making also tended to take place in the unions (with the exception of village communes, but that's hyper-locally). So in terms of organization, the working class remained divided.
It's been a long time since I read about this history but I think there was at least one, possibly two attempts at bringing together unions and working-class parties in particular regions (Aragon and maybe somewhere else?) to form something akin to a revolutionary council, but I don't think they were good examples of bottom up participatory democracy.
"Wasn’t the whole point of the FAI political decision-making and the CNT unions economic decision-making (hence the FAI-CNT as the ultimate organization)?
"
The FAI was a federation of anarchist groups throughout Spain. It was never meant to be any sort of mass participatory body for political decision making. It was an organization for anarchists only, and small in comparison to the CNT. FAI members were expected to join the CNT; I'm not sure if this was an official policy or just an expectation. One of FAI's primary goals was to exert influence (through persuasion and taking an active role in organizing, not authority) within the CNT to ensure that it remained true to its anarchist-syndicalist mission and didn't deviate into reformism, as happened to the originally syndicalist CGT in France. After all, the CNT (like the CGT) had open membership to any working class person, regardless of politics. Due to the heavy influence of the FAI within the CNT, it was often called the FAI-CNT.
Off the top of my head one source I remember which sums up this history concisely and quite well is Tom Wetzel's Workers Power and the Spanish Revolution (can easily find online). An Anarchist FAQ is another good online source.
@@LuckyBlackCat ok thanks - i definitely need to reread this stuff, ill check out the Wetzel for sure. when you say the decision to join the government was just made within the CNT - that means the CNT membership did get to make non economic decisions such as that one right? so you’re saying decision making was not open to non members, but members did engage in broad political decisionmaking and not just economic decisions in their industry?
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Yes, correct.
But I don't think it's accurate to describe this as "self-government", at least not in the broader sense that is usually implied by that term. It's self-governance of their union and its activities, but not beyond that.
@@LuckyBlackCat but if the union is the governing power, then what’s the difference? i guess the difference is just for people who aren’t part of the union?
Oohh, the roast against Occupy! But this was great, one of my favourite episodes so far.
thanks! ooh i forgot that i had mentioned occupy - do you know where in the video it is? i’m working on a critique of occupy as part of the critique of the Graeber/Wengrow book, but I didn’t realize that I talked about it already, i want to see what I said before!
oops, nevermind, found it - i forgot that i have writtens scripts… i’ll basically be making that same argument in detail
During the part of the video 45:22 where you said that some agricultural areas distributed goods on demand for free and said that this didn't work, I have actually learned the contrary. In the book The Anarchist collectives by Sam Dolgoff, an in depth account is given of various practices put in place across Anarchist Catalonia during the Spanish civil war. The record noted that many places in Catalonia in this period had replaced the exchange system for a kind of gift economy based on need and desire (though the majority of Catalonia still used money and/or a barter system). Collective villages such as Binefar for example, not only had committees that provided for the local inhabitants but also cared for refugees that came to the village who were displaced by war. An interesting thing to note was that they even took the effort to meet the needs of people who were too young or injured to work. Agricultural collectives such as Graus and Alcora also achieved a similar level of libertarian communism. Again, just can't stress enough how good your videos are.
hi - i was using the same book as a major source! but my memory is that he talked about certain places using ration cards, and other places having “each according to need” take whatever you want (including wine), and that the places that did the each according to need system soon switched to ration cards. am i wrong? can you tell me which pages you’re referring to?
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Don't know the exact page number would be for your book if you're using a hard copy because I used a PDF format, but it is located in chapter 10. is the title "collective in Binefar" listed in your table of contents by any chance? It's listed in my online version of the book. Other collectives are also listed.
@@hassankhan-jg1dx yes that chapter’s there, i’ll check it out ASAP and get back to you
@@hassankhan-jg1dx hey i just re-read the collective in Binefar section but i didnt notice anything about everything being free. it is however a really interesting section about how the government was trying to starve the soldiers on purpose so they would go attack the collective and take their food! The part i’m talking about is in the section Money and Exchange p 73: “Some collectives did in fact abolish money. They had no system of exchange, not even coupons. For example, a resident of Magdalena de Pulpis, when asked, "How do you organize without money? Do you use barter, a coupon book, or anything else?," replied, "Nothing. Everyone works and everyone has the right to what he needs free of charge. He simply goes to the store where provisions and all other necessities are supplied. Everything is distributed free with only a notation of what he took." However, these attempts to really abolish money were not generally successful. Peirats recalls that: Under the constant pressure of political-military circumstances, the first attempts to abolish money and wages had to be abandoned andreplaced by the family wage.”
great video!! i haven’t looked much into anarchist Spain yet, but this inspired me to do more research, it sounds fascinating (and tragic of how it ended)
it wasn’t perfect, but it was extremely interesting, a proper attempt at real socialism
This is an amazing episode! However, there is one little question that's been sorta bothering me. If we want to create a Spain-like anarchist revolution in the US, how will we go about garnering the support of rural populations. The thing is unlike Spain, the majority of US farmers are small landholders, not tenant farmers working for a landowner. I need some ideas for how we can overcome this.
P.S. Another thing I want you to mention sometime on this podcast is the modern day examples of anarchist principles in practice that closely mirror the Spanish Revolution, like Rojava, or the Zapatista communities in Chiapas, Mexico
ha, well i think first we need to worry about getting just anyone on board - like urban people! to have a real free socialist movement you need the vast majority of the population on your side - but agricultural people are like 1% of the population, so aside from big corporation, it really doesn’t matter all that much if they want to keep their land. even in anarchist spain they let people keep their private land if they wanted, so long as they didn’t hire labour.
the real issue is how to communicate with normal people not just political freaks who are a tiny proportion of the population.
and yes i should talk about rojava, i’m just out of date on it so reticent to talk about things i don’t know, and spending so much time researching for the epsiodes that it’s fallen behind. I mentioned zapatistas last episode (11.1) in the contexts of peasants naturally being interested in anarchism.
Hi!!! Could you post books you used for the content describing structure / operations / success etc of Spain's libertarian socialism??? THANKS!!
there’s a link to a bibliography for every episode in the shownotes! for this one i think it’s just Anarchist Collectives edited by Sam Dolgoff, which is a series of participant accounts, but there are a zillion other books and articles on the subject up on libcom.org
Revolution and Counter Revolution in Spain by Felix Morrow goes into the political and military side of it and also explains the betrayal of the Stalinists and the Soviet Union
@@joshuamarx7619 excellent, thanks!
Great content. Love where we're going with this talk. Until embarrasingly recently, I'd argued that Marx was a misunderstood genius and that countries which ostensibly enacted Marxist socalist policies were just Doing It Wrong. But brutal oppression and inequality isn't a bug, it's a feature. All Power to All the People would require lives where we aren't born on an exploitative slope; it'd require land to be treated more like children ought to be...
Check out the videos on that exact topic then
Any idea when the next episode will be out man? I started with the one last one on why attempts at so called communism descend into authoritarianism because I was specifically looking for an answer to that question, before going back to the beginning but I really can’t wait to hear you go deeper into the Russian revolution.
in a couple of weeks, editing now - but it’s not the next russian revolution one - that’s going to be in a few months - it was just too much work for too long, so i wanted to take a break and do something easier - though honestly this one also took way too long and too much work… ill get back to russian revolution after i do a couple of other easier ones
Great stuff as usual.
thanks and thanks so much for your patreon support, i recognize you from new supporters!
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Happy to support someone putting out excellent, thought provoking content. Really hope your hard work pays off and it gets the attention it deserves.
@@leem114 me too!
Can you a make full episode on the spanish revolution and the paris commune? I believe understanding the politics of what the soviets did during that time and different material conditions that led the soviets to crush the anarchist revolution including need to western allies for war efforts is essential to further understanding the revolution and the nature of politics. Specially given the fact that USSR is how most in the world associate left wing politics with,specially ofcourse socialism
i might do those, but i assume there are already good videos on that? i usually only do something if there’s nothing on it, or if i have an original perspective on something
Brilliant again!
You should do a video about the Mondragon cooperatives of the
spanish Basque country.
i imagine there are already a bunch of decent videos on that? i usually don’t cover things that other people have done well
Hi, hope you or someone who knows sees this, but at 45:20 you say some tried to abolish money but this didn't work so well.
Do we know what they tried to do instead of having money?
And what do you mean by it didn't work so well?
Great video also, thanks!
they tried different things in different villages and regions - a lot of places had vouchers allocated by family size, which i think did work, and some places tried just ‘take what you want from the store’ which didn’t work and they went to ration cards / vouchers.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 wow thanks!
I often thought it would probably take a while with free access, at least until the new society is stable.
Whether rationing is the way to go though, am still not sold (pun not intended but I wish it was lol).
I guess the pros of rationing is it stifles the possibility for corruption that money brings, and the complications with pricing/exchange that labour vouchers do too.
Maybe in a free society you'd have rationing for essentials and a labour voucher system for luxuries, then gradually phase out rationing into free access, after which do the same with luxuries.
@@truthhertz10 i dont really have strong opinions on this stuff, it’s stuff to do trial and error and see what works or not. and by not working i forgot to answer - it meant people were just taking too much stuff and they kept running out - in particular the wine!
Very underrated channel
Thanks so much for the excellent content. Can you suggest more detailed resources about the methods the anarchists used to achieve their success? Would love to get some step by step instructions about how to organize this way.
you’re not going to find step by step instructions anywhere, and we don’t know how it would have fared long term, but you can read first hand participant accounts in the compilation Anarchist Collectives by Dolgoff and there are many books on the subject now, you can find a ton of them on libcom.org
Enjoying this channel. When will the episode on property and property rights be available?
probably several months - it takes me about 1-2 months full time to make one of these, and I got sidetracked onto other topics, but I will defnitely be making that episode, you can’t understand capitalism without understanding property rights and you can’t understand alternatives to it without looking at how property is managed in other societies
36:31 sounds like an argument for idealism over materialism right there
It's not a sensible question, anyway, which approach to politics is 'right' or even determines the other
amazing video, btw, highly informative and stimulating!
which argument? but materialism and idealism work together - but i focus on material perspectives because they’re almost completely ignored in academic humanities to the point where people don’t know basic things like where male dominance came from etc
Will you do a video on how we combat Ableism? Great vid btw.
thanks! i hadn’t thought of it, but I think the stuff from these videos applies to every form of oppression and discrimination. you want to push for structures and institutions that give everyone equal bargaining power and decision making authority regardless of ability, and in the meantime you want to raise awareness and make people conscious of the issue. maybe i should talk about it when i do an episode about socialism. what are your thought on it?
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 love the idea. Love all of your videos and can’t wait for you to explore more specific themes regarding these particular social, societal and structural issues from an Anthropological and materialist perspective.
This is so interesting, thanks
17:50 Fun fact: in Canada, women getting the federal vote is partially what caused conscription of Canadian men in WW1.
Basically, during the war, the government was very split on whether to enact conscription or remain a purely volunteer army. The PM, who wanted conscription but didn’t have the political will to do it, knew he might lose the next election, so he passed women’s suffrage for the very first time, but specifically only for women who already had a family member in the army (in essence, only women who would be vastly more likely to agree with his platform could vote), he won a huge majority, and conscription was passed.
My Canadian history teacher in college always thought that story was hilarious.
love that story, did not know that! often huge things like women’s rights can hinge on political calculations by/for one person if that person is high enough in the hierarchy!
28:28 Omg, what a revelation! 😱
Awesome job. I didn't know about the 1381 peasant revolt!
very few people do outside of england! it’s a really fascinating episode of history and a very important lesson for the present!
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 I entirely agree with you. Arguably the most relevant questions of today is what we can learn from 1381 & 1936.
You mentioned how the communist party was the major cause for the demise of the anarchists, referring to the civil war within the civil war. I've read & heard sources speaking also about the endorsement of Franco with ammunition, soldiers, and resources by capitalists like Ford and Exxon. Isn't it an equally important cause, and isn't such the major obstacle we face today in applying the lessons from both peasant episodes?
What are your thoughts on this?
yes 100% the fact that the fascist side was way better equipped was a huge reason for the loss - but by all accounts the anarchists stopped fighting very vigorously and lost all their enthusiasm after the communists dismantled all of their collectives and their militias etc. I didn’t actually say that this was the main reason, I said that “some people say” this, just to emphasize that it was a big issue. I don’t really have an opinion on what the main reason was as I read this stuff years ago and would need to re-read it to say anything with any confidence!
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 The Anarchist leaders joined the Republican government despite their "NO STATE" belief. Stalin's NKVD played the role of butchers of anyone suspected of "Trotskyism." Franco Troops were Moroccan and no attempt at recognizing national independence for Moroccans was made. No leadership both independent and capable of leading and establish a state power independent of the "Anti Fascist coalition" of Bourgeois liberals, Anarchist leaders and Stalinist leadership arose. A victory in Spain would have had a powerful effect in the Soviet Union and could have rolled across Europe to France next and defeated Hitler and putting Stalin in his own gulag.
@@kimobrien. yes
Look forward to the private property video. Though I would have thought wide-spread private property rights was a good thing. That's what I got from watching "Power of the poor" by Hernandez De Soto.
property rights can be good if they protect you from bigger actors trying to coerce you, but in general they serve to allow bigger actors to coerce people who depend on their property to live (employees, tenants, sharecroppers, etc) - i should check that video out though, always good to see how people are arguing the other side
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Ideally everyone would own land, or have a community land trust and have the land owned by the community/collective, but you need a way to reward people for their productivity and input.
Its not fair for 1 person to work 12 hours every day toiling the land, and get the exact same compensation as someone that only works for 12 hours per week. It leads to productive/entrepreneurial people moving to countries/areas where there is private property and the can enjoy the fruits of their labor (brain drain).
Yep, def. a great video worth watching.
@@jzk2020 i think the way people get paid is something to experiment with and see what works best, but the most important thing is to make sure no one has the power to dominate anyone else. so personal property should be exclusive to an individual, but anything that more than one person depends on to live, whether it’s a workplace, an apartment building, a lake - needs to be controlled by the people that depend on it, not just one person. as soon as you allow private ownership of property that others depend on, inequality just skyrockets and doesn’t stop until there’s a giant calamity, war, etc.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 I agree with you on that.
Take away the petro revolution gains, and women will pour back into the home/under their men’s protection. Material (I like to think of it as tech - tools, stuff, and institutions made possible by them) moves the mean consciousness, not just sitting around thinking about how nice it’d be to be nice. This channel is a bit too ‘noble savage’ for my liking, but it still presents some genuinely thought-provoking ideas. Keep it up!
What are your sources for the bit about the bit about the anarchist revolution in Spain?
there’s a bibliography for every episode in the video notes - i think for this one it was dolgoff Anarchist Collectives
Marvellous stuff! Why don’t you have more subs?
thank you! if you have any ideas of how to promote let me know! also please share!
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 how would you describe your work? I don’t want to misrepresent you.
@@marmadukescarlet7791 whatever way you want to describe it is fine - I guess it’s just basic simple political theory that is very neglected and misunderstood, but if you have a better way of describing it, please do!
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 there’s a lot of anthropology in there too. Would sociocultural anthropology be a good fit?
@@marmadukescarlet7791 you mean calling it that or posting it in anthro spaces? you can definitely call it that, and it’s in the materialist or “behavioural ecology” tradition. a lot of anthro schools hate that stuff though, so it might get a bad response in those circles depending on who’s there!
Isn't there a video missing in this series? Where's the 9th one? Is that the one about property you mentioned in the end?
Oh right - number 9 and 9.1 etc are the ones on cancel culture / right wing dominance hierarchy disguised in left wing terms - what is property will be episode 11 (the other Graeber and Wengrow chapters will be 10.1, 10.2 etc). i forgot to move the cancel culture ones to the main playlist cause those were initially just going to be a QnA spitball type series
Was the QA released somewhere? I can't find it on your channel.
i didnt make any QAs?
I can't find any more info online about attraction to people of different ages being dependent on conditions, although that is absolutely huge, right?! We're told constantly stuff like men and women are attracted to X because it's biology (shrug), while intuiting that to be a weaponized and convenient excuse for whatever the norms are at the moment. Could anyone point me toward more information on this? Thanks.
this is something I’ve heard anecdotally from mohawk people a couple of times. Most recently at a bar association lecture the speaker who is Mohawk mentioned it, but i've heard it a few times over the years. however, when I sat down to find some source for it for the video, Iike you I couldn’t find anything, but I chose to include it anyways, so make of it what you will.
I do believe that biology certainly has a role to play in what we’re attracted to, but so does culture and material conditions.
If you want a good book about how economics affect sexual attraction and satisfaction read Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism by Kristen Ghodsee where they had data from eastern vs western europe that showed that the type of guys women were attracted to were different as were the nature of romantic relationships, and how much attention men had to pay to women's sexual satisfaction when women were not dependent on men economically vs when they were.
If you want to barf you can also read pickup artist loser Roosh V’s book on how he wasn’t able to use his con man pickup psychopath techniques on Danish women, (entitled “Don’t Bang Denmark) because they weren’t attracted to money or flashy status symbols the way women in other countries are because they have “too much” economic independance...
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Hahaha. Thanks for the reply! This is maybe the third time someone has recommended this book (the first lol), so it sounds like I need to get on that. And I really appreciate your work.
@@moeg.280 thanks, i appreciate that you appreciate it! Even though the book is a few years old already Ghodsee has recently been interviewed on several podcasts so look for those, I think there’s one on the Jacobin youtube channel from a month a go or two
Hi, it's me your vegan friend. You have a degree in anthropology, right? I recommend mentioning this in each video description and also the About page for your channel. Not that I think we should blindly trust people with degrees, but it does add credibility to your arguments and make people more likely to watch your videos in full.
i do - i’m just averse to giving biographical details about myself, but i guess it matters that people know i have some qualifications to know what i’m talking about, though i don’t think one needs a master’s degree to have read widely and in depth on a subject
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 I agree! It's just that I saw one of your videos posted on reddit and someone's comment was asking, 'Who did this video? What is their credentials?' (paraphrasing) It brought to mind that many people will make snap judgements about whether someone is credible or not and a degree is a quick way to convince someone.
Btw, I forgot to mention, this is a great video, as usual. Keep up the excellent work!
@@shnglbot thanks! can you send me a link to the reddit post? i didn’t realize anyone but me was posting my stuff!
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 I don't remember which sub it was in, but it was for the video just before this one about patriarchy.
I guess from what I understood, idealism and materialism don’t necessarily have to be at odds with one another but actually rely upon one another. Material conditions don’t determine where a society can go nor how it develops but hence the need for ideas to form and spread. Simultaneously, ideas aren’t enough to change society and the means which they flourish can dependent upon the conditions that allow it.
more like materialism sets the contraints that peoples’ ideas and free will can operate in, and increases or decreases the probability that people will make certain choices vs others, and peoples ideas tend to relate to their experience in reality, and are an adaptation to that reality
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 so are saying that materialism comes first or does idealism? Are ideas dependent on the material conditions or can ideas reshape it and move progress via our ideas?
@@guyguy7634 the material world limits what is possible - we can change our conditions accoridng to our ideas, but only within the limits that material reality makes possible!
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 so do we get our ideas based upon materialism or do we know the material reality based upon our ideas?
@@guyguy7634 im not really sure what that means. we get our ideas from a combination of our environment and culture and natural proclivities and constitution
Where can I read more about cultural materialism? What's the best, most up to date literature on the subject?
in anthropology and zoology nowadays, they usually call it “behavioural ecology” - I don’t really know of a particular textbook or book that goes over the whole tradition. The Foraging Spectrum by Kelly which was updated in 2013 examines the spectrum of hunter gatherer societies and the anthropology of those societies from a behavioural ecology perspective. Actually Graeber and Wengrow have an article from 2018 called Many Seasons Ago where they outline the behavioural ecology arguments for why california foragers based their economy on acorns instead of salmon even though acorns suck and they had lots of salmon available, and it’s a good read. Graeber and Wengrow try to argue against behavioural ecology to some extent but I think their argument falls flat! If you can find the version of it in American Anthropologist journal you can see a little debate back and forth because other anthropologists respond to Graeber and Wengrow’s article.
It would be nice if you could make a vdo about the Zapatista movement in Mexico. Many similarities with Catalonia
i think there are several other people who have done good vidos on that? i usually stick to stuff that no one has done a good job of and articulate ideas that haven’t been synthesized yet or that are unduly obscure
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Make sense what you say, Yes, there are good written articles and some videos. But there is still room for an analysis in depth
@@madrededeus if there isn’t anything in depth maybe i’d look into it for the future
Thanks so much!
you’re welcome!
Maybe a synthesis between materialism and idealism can be looked into.
i think i mentioned it in the video, but they’re not exclusive, they work together, they’re both facets of the same thing - i focus on materialism because our culture or so intent on ignoring it.
What are some more resources pertaining to the Anarchist Revolution in Spain in 1936-1939?
there are a lot of good books nowadays, but the one I know best is Anarchist Collectives by Sam Dolgoff, a collection of eyewitness/participant accounts. You can also find a lot of stuff online on libcom.org
What's the song at 36:24?
it’s by tony ezzy (tonyezzy.bandcamp.com) - i;m not sure which song, but you can write him and ask him!
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Thank you!
ooh, i just found it on my computer - it’s called “Peurmanent FX” - not sure if it’s been released or if he just gave it to me - you can contact him on his bandcamp page though
I find the brief period of anarchist spain interesting as compared and contrasted with the american south. both groups lost their civil wars and both groups seemed to retain a fair amount of their ideology in spite of the loss.
whenever i hear of "a great thing" (that got defeated) I always wonder exactly what sets those things apart from "the great things" that last for hundreds of years.
What do you mean by "great things that last for hundreds of years?"
@@choosecarefully408 I mean political stability. i mean, i know the US has some dark history, but the injustice we experience, which is real, seems to be on a desireable level compared to places with coups and stuff. we had only one civil war for example.
i know its a complex picture, but the internal peace of the US has helped bring about a lot of positive human activity. for everything else that deserves to be said about google/youtube, its pretty cool that anybody with something to say can share it with potentially thousands if not millions of people. if the (actual) left is going to succeed, it will be because technology has enabled co-operation and independence at a scale much larger than was possible before.
if they were devils who founded the US, then the devils deserve their due. it may not have been very democratic at the start, but it was built vulnerable to democracy and we have seen lots of slow reform without the need for revolution, the only exception so far being slavery, which for my money is proof of why politics are a flawed way of reforming society. being black in 1870 was better than 1850 i am sure, but the road to liberation is much longer than amending the constitution and settling it on the battlefield.
This is really interesting, however you forgot to include Australia and New Zealand in your anglosphere analysis.
Australia's geopolitical claim as one of the oldest, most inventive parliamentary and social democracies has been well established. It's also the first nation to grant women the vote. The secret ballot, the eight hour day and the wage arbitration system originate in Australia. Granted it's not perfect, as the constitution then only applies to white Australian. As indigenous I'm acutely aware of the injustices in the system. However, I'm hopeful that this will change, especially with the current government.
I'm interested in your analysis regarding the material conditions that made these changes possible
hi - super interesting i didn’t know this about australia - i just checked and saw women got the right to vote in 1902. i did know that australia had the first socialist government ever elected - but i just don’t know enough about australia to know why this happened. for female suffrage my guess is that women’s labour was really important giving them a lot of bargaining power (this was one of the factors leading to womens’ rights in scandinavia), and maybe because it’s a big continent there’s lots of place to escape to for a woman with a domineering husband? maybe as an ex prison colony there were less women vs men, so they had more bargaining power that way as potential spouses? but i just don’t know. the one thing i do know but i still am not sure of why is that in australia the indigenous people were all immediate return hunter gatherers, which is a type of hunter gatherer that in most of the worst has gender equality, but in australia, although the traditional aborigines are very egalitarian compared to most societies, there’s also male dominance which is unusual for immediate return societies. there are debates about whether that’s somethings that’s relatively recent or ancient and why that would be.
would you consider doing an anarcho-socialist analysis of the cuban revolution and modern history? or do you have a link to good video on this?
i’m interested, but don’t know enough ebout it at this point to point you in a good direction, and i probably have 10 years worth of other subjects i want to cover before i get there, so not likely to happen soon!
Do you have a source for Haudenosaunee women being considered most attractive in late thirties and early fourties? I'm trying to win an internet argument. Fantastic series btw. I've watched and rewatched each episode
thanks - no actually, i’ve heard it talked about a few times from mohawk people. i looked for some kind of source for it to cite for the video, but honestly couldn’t find anything!
Also, is there a place I can download these episodes? If the podcast “it could happen here” comes true, I’d love to have your analysis in my bunker (or commune)
hey - i just saw this now - there are some firefox extensions that let you download the videos - or for the mp3s archive.org/details/@what_is_politics
Is there a part 9 to this?
of this show or about materialism? there are a bunch of episodes since this! the dawn of everything ones are all about materialism, and i did a couple 9, 9.1 on culture war stuff
So would you say that the political compass is invalidated, and that the spectrum should be egalitarianism vs authoritarianism?
yes - equality vs hierarchy. you can divide it up into different categories - political institutions, economics, culture, international relations - but it’s always hierarchy vs equality
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 the only competing definition I have would be publicization vs privatization, but I think you articulated that these water down what those concepts are intrinsically tied to, and public ownership (from my basic understanding) is when the people decide with equal stake in how an industry is run, with more initiated members leading policy but with open-minded reception to differing desires- this is also what I was highlighting when I mentioned the difference between a leader and a ruler.
@@Thrna_1 yeah private vs public just adds a layer of confusion because the definition of public is contentious and private depends on private property concepts. basically if people have an equal say in the decisions that affect them, in proportion to how much the decisions affect them, you’re on the left (and “public” fits that depending on your definition of public) while if there’s a hierarchy of decision making it’s on the right (and “private” fits there if you mean private owner decides what to do and dependant people have to contract with the owner etc.
You mention Hungary and Austria, and WWI, as influences on “Anglo countries”’ shift to women’s right to vote. But the suffrage movements in both Hungary and Austria, as well as Anglo countries, were in fact predominantly influenced by the Russian revolution -- first the "February revolution" of 1917: women’s right to vote in Russia was adopted in March 1917. Then, after the Socialist "October revolution" of 1917 women's rights in Russia were expanded further. These developments, and the robust Russian women's movement that participated in the revolution, had a huge impact on the women's rights movements in Europe and the US. One and a half years later limited right to vote was adopted in Austria and Hungary, and in 1919, in the US. Historian Julia Mickenberg has written about this fascinating history - "Suffragettes and Soviets: American Feminists and the Specter of Revolutionary Russia" (The Journal of American History, Vol. 100, No. 4, March 2014). Also -- thank you, your podcast is fascinating.
interesting, i’ll check that out - i didn’t mention it because it wasn’t in the sources that I had read for that part, but it does make sense.
Since you talked about Iroquois, I've been thinking about a thought experiment how would the gender relations develop over centuries if gunpowder was never invented, since lack of it would prevent their conquest by USA and the industrial revolution.
This thought experiment also is dependent upon them embracing european agricultural technices and weapons like cavalery or pikeman. And I think they would due to rising population and military presures from other tribes and maybe even some Europeans.
I think thease thinks would cause men staying at home more. European agricultural technices like plowing were dependent upon man's work and better military technologies reguering lesser procentege of man to operate. Men staying at home tends to lead to them using their military power to gain political power. This might result in warrior chiefs making themself more and more independent upon the Clan Mothers and latter replacing them with apointed mayors or administrators. Also it is possiable they would keep good chunk of their power like keeping power over village administration or coming to dominate clergy or comertional activities like the women in Sparta did. This would by my opinion probably result in European style monarchy with king and male dominated warrior nobility and female dominates or mixed merchants and clergy
PS: I think lack of gunpowder would result in
1. USA never conquering them since without it it would by late 18th century became dominated by warrior nobles who would never cross Appalachia
2. Since first Europeans would never came to dominate India and Indoneasia which greatly helped fund the British one and second since the European system would remain dominated by monarchies ruling with consent of nobles and merchant and never have the move toword purely burguas ones
there are a lot of assumptions built in there which would change the scenario radically if they didn’t turn out to be correct, but that’s certainly a plausible scenario!
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Like which one please tell how it could go differently
@@janvancura8412 well, maybe they wouldn’t adopt european farming techniques because they would still suffer population decimation because of european diseases, so there wouldn’t be the population pressure to adopt those. or maybe the europeans wouldn’t be limited to behind appalachia etc - maybe the fact that there is more free land but with a weaker european government, european lower class people can escape into indian land and this forces european governments to be more democratic in response. lots of possibilities, too many unknows!
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Well thats why I have these proceseas last centuries, so the population pressures would eventually apear.
It is likely some minor European involvement beyond appalachia aside from trade most likely from Mountin tribes of European decent form by escaping peasants or settled Scots.
Well if the local monarch (it is imposiable European goverment would be able to keep other in name only control without gunpowder) would ever give some estate style representation to the peasants, they would revoke once it fills up
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Also one think that I find most is that the same think that lead to Matriarchy surviving is the same think that lead to them being crushed, which is lack of farm animals
I had no idea anthropology was this based!
i’d say you can barely understand politics at all unless you know some anthropology! and sadly nowadays you can get a PhD in anthro in many schools and never learn most of this stuff
That would be an awesome Epic Rap Battle: Karl Marx vs Max Webber!
YES - more 19th century / early 20th C german rap battles!
Villainage sounds a lot like sharecropping in the American South.
100% - servile labour is servile labour, all these forms resemble eachother with a little more or less freedom for the worker, same with the spanish tenant farmers and roman coloni
You will probably be interested to hear, that in Switzerland changes to the constitution have to be voted on by the "people" (at that time men), women only achieved the right to vote/ elect in 1971 (1991 in Apenzell Innerhoden, where men voted all together at the same time in an open space - Landsgemeinde). The cantons (like states in the USA) hold a lot of autonomy and wheras in other country only politicians had to be convinced, in Switzerland a majority of men had to agree to women's right to vote.
yes! and like i mentioned, switzerland was not involved directly in WWII or WWI so women didn’t get the bargaining power advantage they had in the other participart countries.
Excellent. I'm listening, as I mentioned before, from Munich (mostly while swimming in one of our public pools) coming more from the side of philosophy or the critique of philosophy by Ludwig Wittgenstein. If one is "blinded" (like me) "by Wittgenstein" everything that you say makes perfect sense as W. inimitably demonstrates how everything that makes us up externally as well as internally (even "thoothache)" is a function of our "form of life" which, of course, is materially ingrained.
interesting i’m quite ignorant of philosophy so i wasnt aware, thanks!
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 Wittgenstein, as I understand him, is merely exposing philosophy's baselessness. He shows us how to cast off the urge to philosophize, identifying what counts and suffuses us in the effect of the rules that shape human interaction. - It's a pity that the anarchists discarded not only the Roman church, but also Christianity that actually underlies and fuels their project.
@@MartinThau i’m sure you can be a good anarchist with any religion or lack of religion! orwell felt that their anarchism was actually a religious belief in its own right. their experience with organized religion was as a tool of social control so they hated it with a passion for the most part
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 But can you be an anarchist without hatred?
@@MartinThau of course, why not?
Hey! It's always me, the biologist who thinks free will is a scientific impossibilty. Great video as always, but sorry if I would like to divert again the topic of this video with my obsession for free will. If I'm being to insistent to talk about the theme of free will, that might upset or simply not interest you, please tell me and I will stop making these kind of comments.
If you like me making these kind of monothematic comments, here's my question:
Don't you think that the non existence of free will completely solve this debate of idealism Vs materialism, in favour of a full materialist perspective?
yeah im not super interested in that - for me, it’s not a debate, if you think if will as a material reality constrained by material reality, genetics, history, culture etc
I can always tell which videos I have to fully take in because I haven't liked them yet.
"latifundia...where a powerful aristocrat owned huge swaths of land worked by tenant farmers ... who own nothing but their own labor and some personal possessions."
kinda like wage slaves today who own their own car and a computer at most and work for companies that are either owned by or themselves work in the interest of some of the wealthiest people in the world.
that’s how we do it!
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 i appreciate your responsiveness
@@cunjoz haha, i appreciate that people like what i’m doing enough to think about it and comment etc!
The idea that WW1 experience (and not the Spanish Flu, or what have you) put the mind zap on the previously clueless and isolated womenfolk and that this explains the failure of a timely response to material conditions limps a bit, IMO. It sounds even rather idealist. The American war was relatively short and the AEF never had much more than 2 million men abroad at any time (total military did exceed 4 million) out of a population of over 100 million. However, the idea that women never communicated much until they hit factories--where they DID have time to goof off and chew the fat is and share their new radicalism is, well, not obvious. I think a fair view is that urban women WERE connected through many channels before the war and that there isn't so much to suggest that the war (or the Flu) changed social patterns among female Americans in an important way. That said, "collective awakening," while hardy a particularly materialist concept, is definitely a thing among human groups and I can't say that your theory is wrong, bit it feels more supposed than your ever thoughtful material typically does.
The real reason the 19th Amendment happened is because the GOP calculated that women would vote disproportionately Republican, ergo they should have the right to vote. This is how African-Americans got the right to vote. The Republican Party saw they could (and for a time did) allow the GOP to utterly dominate the politics of the postbellum South and thus national politics entirely. It wasn't because the war and emancipation led African-Americans to a new consciousness and new opportunities to communicate and organize, though those factors were present and one is free to make that argument.
i think that “collective awakening” due to new circumstances is a totally materialist argument - even if it’s not correct in a given scenario. i never said anything about the 19th amendment or about the civil war leading to new black consciousness, that doesn’t even make sense given the circumstances. and i certainly didn’t argue that every war gives people new consciousness, though it very often gives them more bargaining power.
i’m sure there was some political calculation involved in the 19th amendment, but if that were the entire reason for it, then don’t you think it would be an extremely bizarre coincidence that women also got the right to vote in canada and half of europe and new zealand etc at the exact same time… and you’re missing the point - the GOP or any party can’t pass some huge amendment like that unless there’s already huge support for it. where did that support come from, all of a sudden all over the western world all at the same time…?
and i never characterized women pre wwi as clueless etc - it’s just a fact that new experiences (i.e. new material realities) even short ones (and 2 years is not short) that put people in contact with new people can be enormous catalysts to activating people on ideas and feelings they already have. happens over and over throughout history.
Slavery had a lot of internal contradictions, and that's when the slaves revolted.
Feudalism had a lot of internal contradictions, and that's when the serfs revolted.
Capitalism has a lot of internal contradictions...
duh, and? did they revolt 24-7? no. at what moments did they revolt? at what moments did they win or lose their revolts?
The message is that economic systems change over time due to the amount of internal contradictions, and capitalism won't be any different, hence the elipses points.
It won't happen 24/7. Material conditions must be set in order for it to happen in a cohesive manner.
@@funnyguyflips Sure, but that’s a really vague way of looking at things. You’re just saying that there are inherent class conflicts built into hierarchical societies. (“Contradictions” is basically a muddled confusing word for class conflict / conflicts of interest.)
That’s correct, but it doesn’t get us anywhere. The class conflicts don’t inherently cause the societies to change or collapse. Hierarchical societies can go on for thousands of years. You have male domination in patriarchal pastoralist societies for millennia and that doesn’t inherently result in women overthrowing the patriarchy automatically over time.
Women can and do improve their position in certain circumstances and time and places, but not in others.
What I’m doing is looking at where and when there are opportunities that present themselves which facilitate change so that we can take advantage of them as they arise and not sleep through them.
@WHATISPOLITICS69 Ah, I see. I 100% agree with you there, maybe I am being a little vague.
But marerialism can be idealistic too, that's how theories and ideas are born.
Do you think it could have been possible for humanity to avoid this 12,000 year period of hierarchical society? Could there have been agrarian gender egalitarian societies that slowly progressed into egalitarian industrial society?
i don’t know that it could have happened differently, but I think the conditions are now such that we have choices in the future. I’ll talk aboutit more in future episode but all the tech and computing power and communications technology open up a lot of doors.
but there is evidence that civilizations like the indus valley civilization were egalitarian and evolved out of egalitarian agricultural societies. we don’t know for sure but there are many reasons to think that, if you look it up you should find some articles on this. it seems to be more and more of a dominant interpretation of the evidence, but i dont know enough to be able to judge one way or the other.
Not sure the Dems/GOP; manager/bosses analogy works
why do you say that?
You sure are a strange mix of materialist and libertarian. In what sense was anarchist Spain stateless? They employed indirect democracy and they were repressive towards counter-revolutionaries. Since they never left the civil war phase, you can always play it down as military conflict but they would still have to repress counter-revolutionaries afterwards.
It's clear to me that both scenarios are stateless in the Weberian sense of not laying claim to a monopoly on "legitimate" use of violence, but I'd assume you'd have a materialist definition of statehood in mind, like "carrying out the violence necessary to uphold certain relations of production".
EDIT: I guess you could materially define statehood as administrative dominance hierarchy.
like you just noticed at the end, whether anarchist spain was stateless or not depends on your definition of stateless - i haven’t actually decided on a definition yet, i’m going to settle on one when i sit down to do a “what is the state” episode.
marx’ and weber’s definitions are good, but i’m not satisfied with either of them.
anarchist spain was a state in the marxist sense though if they’d won the war it would have ended up not being one over time.
but more importantly, I’d disagree with you about indirect democracy - much of anarchist spain was under direct democratic control via unions and local communes and agricultural coops tied together by various levels of democratic assemblies whose authority flowed upwards vs downwards.
this wasn’t always perfect, particularly towards the end when the anarchists had to join the state government, but it was certainly something much more democratic than representative democracy or any other large scale system that i know of.
I don’t think repressing counter-revolutionaries really makes it a state necessarily, except in the dictatorship of the proletariat marxist state sense. and yes by that definition, anarchist spain was a dictatorship of the proletariat and peasants.
Anarchism in Spain is an example of the failure of Idealism, rejecting the Popular Front and starting doing the revolution in the middle of the war divided the anti fascist coalition that depended on the support of the republican army (with all the liberals that rejected the coup but were against a revolution), the communist party had the correct analysis, defeating fascism was the priority, the victory of Fascism show why it should be the priority of any leftist, that's why the Soviet Union was one of the few countries that supported republican Spain, since the international communist movement already learned that the defeat of a liberal republic under a fascist government like what happened in Germany Italy and Austria would be negative to any leftist movement.
There was no hope of a revolution in Spain, the failure of the revolution in 1934 already show that, when the capitalist used Franco to kill any revolutionary, the only option left was join the Popular Front and defend the capitalist republic against the fascist threat.
well that’s not accurate at all - the anarchists were basically part of the popular front - they eventually even joined the government. it wasn’t division on the left that lost the war, they were simply outgunned. If anything you can blame the the USSR for having crushed the revolution in exchange for soviet weapons, which made the anarchists lose their enthusiasm to fight as vigorously. and there was hope for revolution in spain - it actually happened, except that stalin crushed it before franco even had the chance to do so. a bit similar to what happened in russia in 1918…
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 The USSR send weapons to the popular front, but Spain was not a puppet of the Soviet Union, that was fascist propaganda that said that the popular front, including the liberals were communist, even accusing after the war that the socialist were secret communists, even today they continue to accuse the left of being communist.
And in the end the liberal army with the support of the fifth column did a coup that eliminated the socialist and communist resistance and surrendered to Franco.
@@danielsan901998 every single history of the anarchist revolution points out that the USSR insisted that the anarchists dismantle their communes and undid the revolution as a precondition for support. and the anarchists always blamed this for the defeat. the caballero government wasn’t a puppet of the USSR, but they USSR was constantly exerting pressure via it’s military aid in order to push around the government to bendit to its will, including dismantling the revolution. the USSR was against the revolution because they didn’t want to antagonize the west, and also more importantly because a successful revolution in spain would be a huge threat to the ruling party in USSR.
@@WHATISPOLITICS69 You are talking as if the capitalist of the republic were in favor of an anarchist revolution, that is false, the USSR was in support of the republican government and against doing a revolution because of that, if there was a revolution the capitalist would have been against it, as already happened in 1934 when the republican government send Franco to kill the revolutionaries.
Blaming one of the few countries that supported the republic and ignoring the contradictions of a diverse coalition of capitalist socialist communist and anarchist is just dishonest.
You talk about USSR didn’t want to antagonize the west, while ignoring that Spain was part of the west, the republican government was a capitalist government, communist didn’t want to antagonize the government because for them fighting against the fascist was the priority, and they learned that lesson from the failure of the communist germans.
And talking about "losing their enthusiasm to fight as vigorously" is just idealism, as Orwell said:
“The Trotskyist thesis that the war could have been won if the revolution had not been sabotaged was probably false. To nationalise factories, demolish churches, and issue revolutionary manifestos would not have made the armies more efficient. The fascists won because they were the stronger; they had modern arms and the others hadn’t.”
@@danielsan901998 i never said the republic was for the revolution, quite the opposite, but the only part of the republican side that could actually stop the revolution was the USSR. And when I said “didn’t want to antagonize the west” I mean exactly what you said in the first paragraph. And “losing enthusiasm” is not idealism, it’s rooted in the material fact that without a revolution on the horizon, people don’t fight as hard… I agree with Orwell though - like i said earlier, they lost because they were outgunned. I’m just saying that the anarchists always blamed the USSR. I imagine the USSR made it worse, but that ultimately the stronger force won.
What happened to the great baboon revolution of 1986?
ooh yes, i keep wanting to put that in, but it never fits - i’ll probably do it when I do a full episode on animal politics - but here’s an article about it - the alpha males in a troupe all died from hogging food which was contaminated, and then the rest of the males created a kinder gentler baboon society, and made sure that immigrating males also conformed to their new ‘ideology’ www.science.org/content/article/kinder-gentler-baboon
Materialism isn't even a thing. Because various people believe that all sorts of things have material influences on other things. In such a situation how do we go about discovering what actually has empirical effects? We investigate what actual causes are: empirically. Empiricism involves observation and experiment, getting quantitative (numerical) results which can allow us to predict future outcomes. In constrast: materialism, too often, involves making stuff up; it is only interested in qualitative findings - which cannot be used to discover any 'laws' - be they laws of physics or laws of society. This is because materialism allows one too many degrees of freedom. Materialism based on empiricism is good. But in "social sciences", materialism is often based on long-winded, pseudo-logic; which can easily be false logic. Because too little effort is put into screening out bias, as the narrator has too many degrees of freedom to fit facts to their preferred narrative. Materialism has been one of the great problems of Marxism. Marxist scholars often argue with each other based on who has the correct "class analysis". They should be arguing over what are the actual material drivers in a particular scenario - to discover that one should investigate empirically. But a 'Marxist understanding' allows one to just 'know' based on one's apriori education in Marxism. The dialectic is the other disaster which drove Marxism out of step with reality. Combine the two: to get the materialist dialectic - then you have a formula for using qualitative facts, which one has subconsciously cherry-picked, to invent a narrative of history.
you’re just throwing out the baby with the bathwater. yes you’re right it’s not a perfect science an a lot of people (i.e. marxism) abuse it to foolish extremes, but just to throw it away entirely for that reason is idiotic. do you agree that prices rise when demand is scarce? well, that’s materialism. should we throw that away because we can’t perfectly determine how prices will rise each time or how demand will change to predict the exact price in given conditions? no, we use it because it’s just a general guide to human behaviour and helps us understand what incentives are and how they work so we can try to make some general predictions. the more complicated the situation, the worse the predictions will be, but if you’re not thinking about the incentives built into conditions, you can’t make laws that work the way you want them to, you can’t do negotiations, you can’t do anything.
Omg so fucking mind boggling stuff
The Spanish civil war wasn't even close.
- The nationalists had the entire professional army
-They had the full support of two whole fascist countries, Germany and Italy.
Attributing it to people being demotivated by the dismantlement of anarcho-socialism isn't particularly convincing.
i agree that the republican side most likely lost because the fascist side was just stronger over all - but by all accounts the fact that the communists forces the anarchists to dismantle the revolution did demotivate the anarchist fighters and most likely caused the republicans to lose faster as a result
Some autocomplete for the algorithm: lol lol i dont have to be careful about the video of your dad lol i dont lol i just remembered that I was going on a walk to the park north park east north park park north park east north park park
hahah whuuuuuut???