communism uh it's difficult ideology to design a gap between Theory and reality no no it's the same as capitalism it's got an idealized non-falsifiable theory that has been implemented in different ways as different Advocates of different outcomes right um you know social ownership the means of production I would say it's end or limit private property or private ownership which creates all sorts of of weird problems and and questions that we have to ask like back to you know mixing the land with labor and the idea of the social body and the body is where's public and private raises questions um Soviet Union famously had a lot of problems that it didn't have the the language for dealing with domestic violence right still to this day in Russia domestic violence is a constant source of criminalization and decriminalization because of the idea of the lack of privacy means lack of privacy um the the capacity where the public and private falls apart classic Society or social equality sure everyone according to their ability and their need all sorts of ableism that we'll get into this in two lectures from now um but yes you know Ideal World people according to their ability and their need um again need does a lot of things here need does a lot of work it has the same modernist problems about Enlightenment thinking it has in its ideal form ecological problems in that it's not going to cause social harm to have a system that provides for everyone in terms of environmental damage so the Soviet Union was famously just has huge swaths of of polluted and and contaminated look at the what is it the Czar bomba the largest nuclear weapon ever exploded just irradiated huge swaths of um northern Russia right so and the end of the nation state uh the global communist Utopia so this is the biggest debateest I I'm not going to get into Trotsky differentiations um so I did a lot of my um PhD research on protest and activist groups so I met a lot of different activists and there are yeah so many fights amongst the Communists the idea of a communist plot is hilarious because Communists can't agree on anything um yeah this is an easier way to do it um to to establish it so the idea here is that we have different forms of Communism Lenin famously had this you know wanted to translate what was this Marxist theory or this idea that that we would get to those things but we need to do so uh through this back to Aristotle it's an inversion of Aristotle Brady said that it's not um that we need to have just an elite few acting in the best interests of all it's that that Vanguard party so those leading those the tip of the spear are the ones who are acting directly in the interests of the proletariat of those that are oppressed and so it's a dictatorship of the proletariat so we're not going to make it Democratic because that would be chaos what we're going to do because remember materialism we're going to establish the material conditions that decide that you're a proletariat so you're poor you're working class those poor and working class get to be part of whatever solution comes about and they are the ones that we are doing it for so it's a dictatorship because it's not the free expression of ideas it's a political goal in order to establish a material change in circumstance and and similar to what China has done Russia did as well it took a bunch of basically peasant farmers and transport them into a second world economy right um there's a capability to do so State planning of of certain types of of movement from agrarian to industrialization can be effective in specific ways right uh environment isn't one of them so we have different definitions and we have so Stalin famously um said okay the global communist utopianism uh isn't going to work we have to do this in individual countries um Trotsky the trotskyites famously believe you can't have a Communist Revolution if it doesn't happen everywhere right because you're going to have like it's not going to be fair it's not going to work it's got to be Global or it's got to be nothing right we have to frame it in terms of Internationals we have to do our we have to meet together and say this is how we are going to globally do these things and so the utopianism always falls apart in these these nation states different drug geographies territories understandings framings and experiences and so like all of these utopians they always run into bodies and bodies resist so you know Stalin believed in socialism in one country which then meant that we have to because the dictatorship of the proletariat we have to control everything um so the the worst kind of logical outcome of this was the Khmer Rouge or you could say Jew ideology in North Korea and so the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia wanted to re-plan all Society from the top down which meant taking everybody in the urban centers and forcibly real collocating them to agrarian centers and taking the agrarians and pushing them into the cities it wiped out all education and learning led to the massacre of thousands millions of people right normally state-led socialism results in a lot of death uh Trotsky was assassinated because so uh Stalin didn't want him making all these claims um so there's purges Central planning industrialization and a cult of personality which isn't touched on enough in this chapter the cult of personality is a key thing here it is a key Dynamic that is also linked to populism the Charisma of the leader or the obsession with the leader then becomes a thing that people can rally around so stalinism right became this thing or brezhneva Gorbachev the Kims all of the different the the Kim's uh um just blanking on names right now but from um the end of uh the Korean War on you basically have this call to personality around the the leader um we have this in China with MAO and I mean you could argue still happens today with Deng Xiaoping and then with um she that we get these kind of obsessions that the leader is as important as the party as important as the goals right um and so Mao Mao and his little red book he what he did is is a similar thing to Stalin which is to say that all of them encountered this problem was that there was supposed to be a logical progression from feudalism to capitalism to socialism and communism except a lot of these places where communism took hold didn't have capitalism so what ends up happening is that we have to frame this in terms of peasant revolutions so the Little Red Book was about these cultural revolutions the self-reliance that China is going to build things that a Chinese way that we're going to have specific ways of doing it we're going to revolutionize also results in famines and deaths estate planning doesn't work the best especially because they don't have any feedback mechanisms right they don't not supposed to dictatorship or the proletariatry they're not supposed to have they're not democracies they're explicitly so and so if you don't have democracies you don't know when people are dying because wow you're just a that's just a capitalist plot to undermine our state right um and so the all of these histories of Communism then involve all of these mechanisms of trying to achieve things on mass for the majority of the whatever you want to call them the proletariat The Peasants whatever in order to achieve a better Society so utilizing the state as a mechanism there produces these outcomes and so we end up with these questions is China today a communist state I don't know who's Cuba communist state I don't know um if China's communist what is Canada are we socialists then I don't really understand what's America I considered military socialism in the US like look at the size of the military we don't count that when we think of them as capitalists or how we frame these things and so all these questions are kind of bound up in the idea of what should be the relationship of the state in terms of transforming society and that's what communism is trying to do it's trying to create a utopianism right that's trying to produce this utopian ideal what was that image they showed okay okay uh okay I assumed that that was Umbrella Revolution of Hong Kong um anyways it doesn't matter uh all right so that's a a really truncated view of communism