So, back when I was a social-democrat slightly intrigued by communism I tried to listen to “both sides” to form my opinion and so I looked for videos from both communists and anti-communists. Out of the few things I watched I retained mostly, “Debunking every anti-communist argument ever” by spooky scary socialist on the pro-communist side and this series of 3 videos on the anti-communist side:
Marx, responsable des goulags ? La lutte des classes
Critique de la lutte des classes selon Karl Marx
Critique de l’économie selon Karl Marx
Those 3 struck me as relatively convincing at the time (I knew nothing about Marxism whatsoever back then).
Recently, seeing recommended videos from this channel made me look back and wonder how I would see these same videos now as a Marxist-Leninist and after procrastinating it for months I finally decided to re-watch them. And low and behold, they are dumb.
The youtuber makes a big show of explaining his bare minimum knowledge and shaky comprehension of Marx’s writings which makes it looks like he know what he’s talking about to the uninitiated but it’s really mainly the old anti-communist drivel: denying class struggle and the labor theory of value, pretending that communists want a perfect utopia and say “that wasn’t real communism” when AES are brought up, pretending that Marx was an accelerationist, etc…
I would be interested in having other MLs opinions on this brainrot, especially since for better or for worst it has been part of my political evolution.
You could replace USSR/Russia with USA/NATO and Ukrainians with Russians in your second paragraph and everything would match. You can’t in good faith tell me Russia is brainwashing it’s population but that the West isn’t commanding every major media platform to parrot it’s geopolitical narratives. You can’t tell me that “Greatness” is what matters most to Russia and pretend that the US/EU isn’t drowning in rabid chauvinistic sentiment against it’s opponents out of fear of losing it’s greatness to a country like China.