He starts the video off with the obligatory lib “totalitarianism 42069 gorillion dead” but I promise he actually sincerely engages with Marx’s writing later on from a perspective of somebody that’s done a lot of research on occult writings.
It’s a pretty interesting video, I’ve never heard somebody compare Marx’s Capital to a gothic horror novel and he does have a point when he says some people start looking at Marxism in an almost religious way (looking at you Gonzaloids).
I really like/liked this guy and I remember when I first found him I thought he had really good material analysis and then learned after that he says he’s a structural Marxist or something and was excited. I can deal with the Stalin ate all the grain crap but was mostly turned off by the bit about people treating Marxism religiously in the modern day, which is not how I feel at all. There’s baby leftists out there who maybe are just waiting around for the second coming of the USSR (but perfect this time) but I felt he was painting with too broad a brush and dismissing historical materialism as ahistorical just because capital is in fact hard to win against. Bordering on end of history stuff.
I think maybe it annoyed me to see someone who I usually felt had really good rational analysis say some dumb ass shit (looking at you Sabine Hossenfelder). I think I was also hoping for something about capital as a “real god”/demiurge or something and maybe that wasn’t a fair assumption to go in with
Mostly commenting to remind myself to come back and revisit this video at some point I guess but also hoping other comrades can help me articulate why it rubbed me the wrong way.
He needs to read the Enchantments of Mammon.
To be fair to him this is nowhere near as bad as Sabine’s capitalism video which was really embarrassing even on a Lib level, she just really had no idea what she was talking about.
It just felt like for every positive point he made he had to throw in a jab or two to balance it out, which is unfortunate. Either he actually believes it or was afraid his audience would run away thinking he’s a commie if he didn’t perform sufficient disavowal.
What’s funny is I never even saw the Sabine video on capitalism everyone hates cause I dropped her when she started saying stupid shit about HRT. But yeah this definitely isn’t that bad, I think you’re exactly right about it being some weird balancing act.
FWIW he does say in the end of the video he uses historical materialism often as a framework for analyzing history, he’s not entirely dismissive of Marxism.
Sabine’s video was embarrassing as hell tho, it’s literally just “Um ackshly commie have you heard of economics 101?” but stretched out over a 20 minute video.