The leading actors of the Russian Revolutions of February and October 1917 sought to establish socialism: a deeply democratic economic and political system where the employee/employer relationship is abolished, and where workers control their workplaces, the means of production and the government via the “free association of the producers”.

Instead the revolutions resulted in the establishment of the Soviet Union: an authoritarian state where the government became the sole employer and the state controlled the workers instead of the other way around. This then became the model for “communist” countries around the world who sought to emulate the successes of the Soviet Union, namely industrialization, escaping western imperialism, opening up social mobility for peasants and workers.

Why did the Soviet Union fail at socialism?

What can we learn about this failure to apply to our political struggles in the present and future?


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CHAPTERS

00:00 Last Episode recap
5:09 Why Marxists thought socialism was only for rich countries
7:55 Who were the Russian socialists? Intellectuals and aristocrats
10:35 Parallels to American trust fund socialists
13:09 The class composition of Russia
14:09 The Narodniks: wanna-be “populist” agrarian socialists
17:01 liberal positive zoo animal unicorn fetish object stereotypes
19:08 Peasants as the foundation of socialism
20:37 Socialism as imagined by elite intellectuals

21:26 GOING TO THE PEOPLE
25:07 successes
26:18 failure

26:59 TWO BRANCHES OF RUSSIAN SOCIALISM: “Populism” and Marxism
27:17 Populism and terrorism: The Socialist Revolutionary Party
28:55 Russian Marxism: Socialism for capitalists!
37:37 Marxists and Monarchists united against communism!
40:34 Why form a Marxist party in a country unfit for socialism according to Marxism?

43:32 RUSSIAN ANARCHISM
48:45 The natural Anarchism of peasants
51:34 Anarchism’s failure to connect with their natural audience

52:34 WHAT IS A PEASANT?
Peasants vs indigenous subsistence farmers
Peasants vs. the State
54:33 Early state formation
56:37 Peasants vs nationalism
58:18 Peasants, religion and the state

1:01:01 WHO WERE THE RUSSIAN PEASANTS?
1:01:19 ideology and religion
1:02:49 commune social and economic structure
1:06:30 the “emancipation” of the serfs
1:09:03 the monarchy’s war against the peasant commune
1:10:48 why russian anarchism was so unpopular

1:12:26 MARX 2.0: MARX BECOMES AN AGRARIAN POPULIST
1:22:45 Marx vs. the “Marxists”

1:26:01 gimme

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