Slavoj Zizek: Lenin Was a Radical Opportunist 

Why be disingenuous?

So what? Doesn't mean the video title (aka headline) wasn't misleading. I wonder if the person who wrote it missed the point or if it was essentially clickbait. Either way I think people expect more from this news source.

@@electrosonicnebula Stalin was FDR freind who won the WW2 and beat fascism. Stalin scared the crap out of the Nazi's and rescued the Jews from concentration death camps.

Lenin was a visionary and Marxist Leninism is good communism socialism that does not have evil imperlism per se.

@@weneedcriticalthinking Not talking about Stalin here, not sure what you're on about.

I love it! I have to pause his videos so often to just process his ideas and knowlage.

I mean what did you expect his idol is HEGEL for God's sake😂😂

Especially when one's nose is running.

And the nose seems to be running in perpetuity :) Or - maybe because of what some say - burnt out by coke...?@@vonwane

I feel mostly pity.

This is actually slightly simplistic. The 25% figure is based on cotton textiles. There is a serious debate in Indian historiography about the whole deindustrialisation phenomenon under colonialism.

GDP sucks as a measure of people's well being, in fact even 'standard of living' is misleading, people can make more money on paper and have more services 'available' to them but still be struggling and unhappy

@@riotdrone either way India was messed up by colonial rule in every way. From trillions in potential economic growth done of taken by the British Empire. Then their is the human cost of it all. From the bengal famine to the centuries of cash crop plantation.

@@derektorres3092 100% but i do find the human cost to be more to the point than the sort of capitalist framing of economic success in the world market

There was definitely the displacement and destruction of local traditional sectors but one dimension of this %4 of global gdp outcome was that the rest of the world (especially industrialized west) developed so much that the global gdp was several times larger than it was so India lagged behind (again blame can be on the British) and their share and prosperity declined both in relative terms and absolute terms.

Your sentence is not even incorrect-- it has no meaning. Lenin himself was not from the working class. The working class in Russia had no idea who Lenin was. He himself mad no effort EVER to vist working-class neighborhoods. He lived in many places, but never ever made any attempt to meat the "proletarians." He just sat in cafes and discussed "issurs" --- just like Marx much earlier before Lenin.

@@CaesarRenasci Your entire comment is incorrect! Both men made more effort to worker's organizations than you ever have, or read or wrote on the issue.

@@CaesarRenasci Have you heard of class traitors?

True, Marx also was in contact with European military officers who flirted with Communism to the point of volunteering to the Union Army in the American civil war

I thought he was called “the General” because of his service in the 1848 revolution?

I have a book written by Engels about the German paesants war. So yes your statement's validity is very clear to me.

Oh wow. Where was this?

it's just like an ML to get caught up in things like traditional connotations of terms and not appreciate an idea in it's own context

As an ML I totally disagree. We should learn from Lenin's radical opportunism

@@Ali.Shamsedin he was a dick, who crushed the working classes in russia and crippled them throughout the rest of the world.

I have been saying that for decades.

There are modern medicines for your condition. Talk to your doctor.

Opportunist can be either positive or negative

@@August-p9g Opportunist is famously usually coupled with a negative connotations. We don't exist in a vacuum.

@@TigerT242 and the context was that opportunist was being used with a positive connotation

@@August-p9g Yes. Exactly. In the video. But the title was clearly misleading using the pull of Zizek potentially saying something controversial in the Marxist tradition like denouncing Lenin as a opportunist. It played on that. Clearly. It's not that big of a deal - they want people to watch their videos and I'm glad I watched it, but nonetheless it was misleading.

Agreed opportunist , has a bad rap. A connotation like exploitive. Could be good or bad tho

I think all of Mrx and Engels' letters are online if you know where to look!

maybe it is not, or it might be related but not exactly the one? or maybe he's mixing more than one reference, who knows lol. but this letter has the same gist of what Zizek said. a war throughout Europe, 3 to 10 years of respite and then a new revenge war on France while Russian people overthrow the Tsarism.

Walter Rodney references this quotation about the coming of war in his" The Russian Revolution- a view from the third world".

Below is the famous quote from Engel. I’ve never heard of Engels predicting a second war. (My guess is Zizek is confusing himself.) -- Frederick Engels 1887 Introduction to Borkheim Abstract Written: December 15, 1887; First published: as an Introduction, in S. Borkheim, Zur Erinnerung fur die deutschen Mordspatrioten. 1806-1807, Hottingen-Zurich, 1888. -- And, finally, the only war left for Prussia-Germany to wage will be a world war, a world war, moreover of an extent the violence hitherto unimagined. Eight to ten million soldiers will be at each other’s throats and in the process they will strip Europe barer than a swarm of locusts. The depredations of the Thirty Years’ War compressed into three to four years and extended over the entire continent; famine, disease, the universal lapse into barbarism, both of the armies and the people, in the wake of acute misery irretrievable dislocation of our artificial system of’ trade, industry and credit, ending in universal bankruptcy collapse of the old states and their conventional political wisdom to the point where crowns will roll into the gutters by the dozen, and no one will be around to pick them up; the absolute impossibility of foreseeing how it will all end and who will emerge as victor from the battle. Only one consequence is absolutely certain: universal exhaustion and the creation of the conditions for the ultimate victory of the working class. That is the prospect for the moment when the development of mutual one-upmanship in armaments reaches us, climax and finally brings forth its inevitable fruits. This is the pass, my worthy princes and statesmen, to which you in your wisdom have brought our ancient Europe. And when no alternative is left to you but to strike up the last dance of war - that will be no skin off our noses. The war may push us into the background for a while, it may wrest many a conquered base from our hands. But once you have unleashed the forces you will be unable to restrain, things can take their course: by the end of the tragedy you will be ruined and the victory of the proletariat will either been achieved or else inevitable.

I just wish he didn't have that annoying speech impediment.

@@chrisfrank6625 I'm used to it now

More like an incoherent goat to me. Goats at least don't attempt to speak.

OMG, One of the Major Gigachads of the Breadtube, What a rare site, Greetings Comrade YUGOPNIK.

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@Stefan Weiss lol

The term clickbait, has a negative connotation, but did you enjoy the video?

@@venum17 I did, yes 😁👍

I think it was. They mislead me, but it is a great video.

It's Jacobin, of course they would

@@vietnamd0820 😁

I agree. I would love to listen to him in person someday if I could ever get the chance.

why won't he give a straight answer

@@zah936 He does he just takes a while. He illustrates his points with jokes and stories and distracts himself with tangents sometimes. haha

@@zah936 Like Herodotus he makes frequent, sometimes long (but it must be stressed almost never pointless) multilevel diversions from a straight path though an argument or explanation. You as an intelligent and engaged listener must pay attention and keep track in your mind of what he’s already said and try to keep a mental image of the overall structure of his argument as he speaks. If you’re looking for easily chantable slogans of the kind the sheep bleat out in Animal Farm (“Four legs good … two legs baaaaaaad!”) you’ll mostly be disappointed. But … nevertheless … sniff sniff pinch nose … listening closely… uuuuhhhh … you will always hear important conclusions.

It's funny because if you listen closely over a his interviews, he's remarkably consistent. He just often goes about telling it in a really roundabout way, and has what seems to me like a strong commitment to embracing the ironic, and contradictory parts of things.

that would be rather self-aggrandizing of him. He's giving Lenin a massive compliment here

Zizek is the guy my man The ultimate opportunist, the one who asked for more bombing of Belgrade and spread a lot of propaganda against the Serbs in the 90s. NATO and Europe loved him! That is how he got his ticket to famous Universities of the West that is how he got his first invitations on media conglomerates, spreading their favourite imperialist narrative and a BONUS he is saying it as a "communist ". This guy is going to call Lenin an opportunist?

Lmao

He's been riding himself pretty hard.

They knew exactly who they invited. This conversations goes entirely as expected. Very satisfactory.

They have Slavoj Zizek on, you want him to take up space. That's why you invite him.

kinda... half-assedly because they were trying to follow the Lenin faction of the international. They had a real big debate and almost didnt decided on it, but even after were convinced to oppose the war, they didnt do anything do oppose it and just announce it in name only tldr didnt really do shit to organize war opposition. For more information read about the history of the 4 first congresses of the Comitern

Thousands of workers. Meanwhile Aleksei Brusilov was alive and well in Moscow.

@@jussim.konttinen4981 The Iron General who changed his uniform because it was opportunistic to do so. The slime of Politics.

Ye okay ? but in this interview Zizek is talking about Lenin b4 and immediately after the revolution from Feb to October... so doesnt really see how your point contradict the interview he gave

The bolsheviks where fighting the white army until 1922.

Marx used to play the stock market, and was decent at it apparently. Maybe they had a crystal ball?

Also quite literally hard to listen to. I dont want to be agist (sp?), but he takes 2 minutes for each sentence. I lose track of the subject before he finishes his thought.

@@MistaZULE geez, people: check your weird commodified way of talking and thinking about scholars whose political commentary you consume. Chomsky is 93 years old. He is a human being and not some trained monkey to cater to our tastes. His enormous pensum of public appearances literally is only testament of his deep dread about the future of humankind because of climate change - he very literally gives his last breaths on this earth to this cause.

@@ithemba Sure, but am I not allowed to make statements based on how I percieve him? Yes he's a great scholar, but at some point if his words become impossible to understand due to his advanced age then I will not listen to his speaking tours. The same can be said of Slavoj. The guy takes 15 minutes to provide context to answer a simple question. Every scholar has quirks, and I believe Chomsky's advanced age makes him hard to listen to. No commodification involved, he's just old.

This has always been the problem with Chomsky. He never learned to make his message palatable. He was virtually banned from mainstream social/political/economic commentary in the USA because his message was considered dangerous to the powers that be, but also because he's just not that interesting to listen to. It's not a case of the populace having a short attention span, it's just that he's naturally boring. Ziek talks A LOT, but he never fails to keep the listener engaged.

@@ithemba it's not so much his manner of speech, I can understand him fine, but I think as you get older the real you comes out. For all of Slavoj's jokes about his own stalinism, Chomsky starting to show his authoritarianism and disdain for the general public. Whereas when Zizek is 92 I think he's going to be cracking dick jokes and reviewing anime

yeah i know what is up with that Jacobin is supposed to be the cream of news organizations

@@electrosonicnebula jacobin is pretty shit tbh, but they occasionally do great stuff and that’s all I need lol

@@DripEmpError Compared to what? Intercept and Daily Poster are pretty good. And Bad Faith and Some More News and Democracy Now. Then New York Times and NPR to see what the patriotic left wing is thinking. Anyway the analysis is usually pretty obvious. It's nice when they talk about actual legislation being passed or mix in some history, which this does- Zizek is entertaining although barely intelligible half hte time

This is some really good stuff -- would you mind telling me where I could read more?

@@thetumans1394 Lenin's book "The State and Revolution" is a start. There's been a ton written on the guy and he himself wrote a lot so it's hard to come up with a list lol. Bertrand Russell didn't write much about it but talked about it in interviews you can listen to on RU-vid

@@jamespuso1627 I've read S&R, and I found it super useful. I was more meaning on the topic of analysis of Lenin as "overly dogmatic"; the thing you wrote about Lenin viewing the SSR as a place-holder is absolutely fascinating to me.

@@jamespuso1627 I think reading just one book of Lenin is not going to be enough especially if it's "State and revolution", cause he later dismissed a lot of even his own theories. Point of Lenin is that he was and steal is the most POLITICAL political theorist of all time. He had such great sense of social reality and how it worked, that he would without any problem adapt his theories to it immediately in order for them to be a theoretical support for action. He dissmised utilitarian perspective he made on State and Revolution on the basis of this being essentially a state of one nation dominating the other one (this his view is displayed in his work on national question). He then let New Economic Policy happen, when he understood that it is necessary and made a theoretical basis even for that, arguing that state capitalism is a best way we can move to socialism. He also trashed a lot of revolutionaries for being dogmatics and seeing Marxism as a bunch of biblical dogmas instead of a tool and an a general orienting theory for action. Point of Lenin is that he hated abstract definition of anything, he always strived for concrete truths. So there was no general truth for him. Just concrete analysis of certain situations.

Lenin was far more influential & long-term successful in the world than Oliver Cromwell (temporarily/locally). Most don't know who is Oliver Cromwell, but Lenin is used as reference for the progress of socialism.

Bring a raincoat

members content. it's infuriating, but there's enough channels out there that i don't really care.

​@@ethanstumpbruh what kind of leftists are they lmao

@@valeriobenedetti7791 the kind that come from "backgrounds" instead of poverty. eh, personally i'd rather have these then any sort of unaware types. but even then, you get into nonsense about what is more or less empirical when it comes to actually how analyzing the lives of stalin's soldiers actually typifies the day to day ideology of soviet Russia more than any words out of linen's mouth. but then, that's even if you are in the same room as these people, which happens rarely.

Late reply but yes, we have to be pragmatic and reach people in whatever way works to reach them. Marxism is a set of tools and we shouldn't be dogmatic. We should realize where we are right now, which is an extremely backwards capitalism with extreme disunity among the lower class, and so I think our rhetoric has to reflect that and be as anti-fascist as possible while being in language the population can understand. But this isn't an argument for not trying to find the weak point and pushing for overthrow of the capitalist imperial core or capitalist periphery states when the chances arise.

In this context, neither 'radical', nor 'opportunist' are negative terms

www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1887/12/15.htm

Zizek is you son? Or Lenin?

@@gohyde they are brothers :D

Are there any criticisms you have on his historical takes in this particular video?

@@ben5154 Yes, I do. He was asked about the WWI and he didn't answer the question at all. The historian Christopher Clark they should've interviewed in stead of this clown. He knows more about what precipitated the WWI then anyone ese on the planet, absolutely astonishing scholarship. His book: The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914. Here is the gist of it for the Gresham College: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-6snYQFcyiyg.html&ab_channel=GreshamCollege

@@lunaridge4510 I don't think that's fair. You don't ask a philosopher about organic chemistry. Same way that you don't ask a historian about Hegelian Dialectics. If you don't know Slavoj then don't click on the video. He's not a historian he's a Marxist philosopher who primarily does media analysis, he's not and never claimed to be a historian.

@@MistaZULE I do know Zizek and his specialty tho. My post was in response to a previous post about history which was replied to in the usual contemptuous, dismissive comrade manner. I consider myself a Marxist philosopher too. Until the left stops its internal sectarian warfare, we will achieve nothing.

@@lunaridge4510 Fair enough. I agree that this infighting among the Left is a huge problem, and it seems people just want to talk at each other rather than listen. Honestly, if these excahnged were in person I hgihly doubt the dismissive tones in coneying ideas would continue. The nature of speaking in person vs the anonymity of the internet leads to snide comments and the ignoring of major points. I don't really know where I'm going with this, but I do agree with you.

Well, as much of an enjoyment it is to hear Zizek, he is a leftcom bourgeois intellectual*

@@whythelongface64 you dont know what leftcom means or ever meant

@@levine4970 ok 👍

@@whythelongface64 I agree that he is a bourgeois intellectual, but calling him a leftcom is a compliment he doesn't deserve. Not all non-Stalinist or even non-Leninist communism is pro-capitalist and counterrevolutionary.

@@dumupad3-da241 wouldn't call him pro capitalist, but counter-revolutionary? Yes so much this

Chomsky is 100% a menshivik

They just don’t want to grapple with Chomsky’s point that Lenin’s decree on workers control destroyed any prospect for workers’ control of production and subordinated workers to state management. Capitalists got replaced by state managers, not by unions or factory councils of workers i.e. they never achieved anything resembling socialism.

@@comradetrashpanda8777 What a demented statement. Chomsky is an anarchist, not communist. Both Mensheviks and Bolshevics were communists who saw anarchists as the political enemy #1 and the latter eventually murdered them all. They both belonged to a party that favoured hierarchy and top down decision making with tiny elite leadership on the top.

@@stephenpedroza9123 Lenin used the soviets to gain power, the same way he took over the democratic socialist's platforms that promised land to peasants---he had no desire to actually give them the land, it was a cynical plot. Sure enough, the Bolshevics took the land back almost right away and disabled the soviets politically thru bureaucracy and terror. They even took the peasant's citizenship away turning them into virtual serfs again; villagers had no passports until Hruschev gave them back (to those who had not been sent to Kazakhstan to die, of course). This was a preconceived plan by a bunch of brilliant sociopaths. Remember, Trotsky was also a Menshevik at first, but rose to become a perfect Bolshevik henchman. There was really no difference.

He didn't say Chomsky is a Menshevik. He said that Chomsky claimed Mensheviks are the true Marxists and not the Bolsheviks.