YouSaid · the spoken record

Vejas Liulevicius

lines on the record: 198
first: 2024-09-20
most recent: 2024-09-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“For other reasons, whether it's because of their Ukrainian identity, whether it's because of a desire for a different nationalist project. So for Stalin, there are many motives that roll into collectivization. And the final thing to be said is you are quite right that collectivization proves to be a failure because the Soviet Union never finally gets a grasp on the problems of agricultural production. By the end of the Soviet Union, they're importing grain from the West in spite of having some of tremendously rich farmland to be found worldwide. And the reason for that had to do in part, I think, with the incentives that had been taken away. Prosperous individual farmers have a motive for working their land and maximizing production.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This produces vast human suffering because for the farmers, their plot of land that they thought they had gained as a result of the revolution is now taken away. They no longer have the same incentives they had before to be successful farmers. In fact, if you're a successful farmer and maybe have a cow as opposed to your neighbors who have no cow, you're defamed and denounced as a kulak, a tight-fisted exploiter, even though you might be helping to develop agriculture in the region that you're from. The result is human tragedy on a vast scale and allied to that incidentally is Stalin sense that this is a chance to also target people who are opposed to the Bolshevik regime.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is the sine qua non. That's their envisioned future. Agriculture rates below. So in that case, the crucial significance of collectivization is to get a handle on the food situation in order to make it predictable and not to find oneself in another crisis like during the Civil War when the cities are starving, industry is robbed of labor, and the factories are at a standstill. This is really the core approach to collectivization, to put the productive capacities of the farmers in a regimented way, in a state-controlled way under the control of the state.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even as articulated in Marx's writings, is to put agriculture and farming on a factory model so that you won't need to deal with this traditional role of the independent farmer or the peasant. Instead, you'll have people who benefit from progress, benefit from rationalization by working factory farms. In approaching the question of collectivization, we have to keep in mind that for Stalin and his comrades who are bound and determined to drag Russia kicking and screaming into the modern age and not to allow it be beaten because of its backwardness, as Stalin puts it, traditional forms of agriculture are not what they have in mind. And in their rank of desired outcomes, industrialization, especially massive heavy...”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Taking place over centuries and headed towards the final utopia, the role of farmers there is negligible. Peasants get called conservative and dull as sacks of potatoes in Marx's historical vision because they're limited in their horizon. They farm their land, their plot and don't have greater revolutionary goals beyond working the land and having it free and clear. By contrast, industrialization. That's progress. Images that today would be deeply disturbing to an environmentalist sensibility, smokestacks, belching smoke, the byproducts of industry, a landscape transformed by the factory model. That's what Marx and then later the Bolsheviks have in mind. Similarly, the goal”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think the short answer is that the Bolsheviks in particular, but also communists more generally have had a very conflicted relationship with agriculture. Agriculture As a very vital, obviously, but also very traditional and old form of human activity has about it all of the smell of tradition and other problematic factors as well in a place like Russia or the Russian Empire, peasants throughout history for centuries had wanted one thing and that was to be left alone to farm their own land. That's their utopia. And that for someone like Marx, who had a vision of historical development and transcendence and progress as being absolutely key does not mesh at all with that vision. For that reason, when Marx comes up with this tableau, this tremendous display of historical transfer.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For some people, those might not actually be opposed, but might even be mutually reinforcing, which is a very scary thought.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's an excellent question, and you're quite right. I mean, we cannot peer into the inmost recesses of somebody's being and know for sure. My intuition, though, is that this may be a false alternative, a false dichotomy. It's natural enough to see somebody who does monstrous things to say, well, ideology is being used as a cover for it. But I think that my suspicion is that these were actually perfectly compatible in his historical role. The notion that there's an ideology, it gives you a master plan for how history is going to develop and your own power, the increase of that power to unprecedented proportions, your ability to torment even your own faithful followers in order just to see them squirm, which Stalin was famous for, to keep People unsettled. To me, it seems that”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Any laws whatsoever. Dictatorship in its purest form, something that Lenin had avowed and then Stalin comes to practice even more fully.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And discipline, somebody who gets things done, that's the crucial ethical standard. And ultimately in criticisms by later dissidents of Bolshevik morality, this question of what is the ethical standard? What is the ethical law will bring this question into focus? Because by the, and this goes back to Marx as well, incidentally, the notion that Any ethical system any notion of right or wrong is purely a product of class identity because every class produces its distinctive ideas, its distinctive religion, its distinctive art forms, its distinctive styles means that with no one transcendent or absolute morality, it's all up for grabs. And then it's a question of power and the exercise of power with no limits untrammeled by”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it seems that Stalin's personal copy of the prince, nobody knows where that is if it still exists. But historians have found annotations in works by Lenin that Stalin, who is a voracious reader, as it turns out, made in the back of one of the books, which sounds almost like a commentary on Machiavelli's almost but not quite suggestion that the ends justify the means. Stalin's own writing says that if someone is strong, active, and intelligent, even if they do things that other people condemn, they're still a good person. And so Stalin's self-conception of himself is someone who along these lines and in line with Lenin's emphasis on practical results.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Zerzhinski is succeeded by figures who will be absolutely instrumental to Stalin's exercise of power. And they're not immune either. Stalin, in his purges, takes care also to purge the secret police as a way of finding others upon whom to deflect blame for earlier atrocities and to produce a situation where even committed Bolsheviks are uncertain of what's going to happen next and feel their own position to be precarious. I mean, incidentally, there are other influences that probably are wrought to bear here as well. It gets said about Stalin that he used to spend a lot of time flipping through Machiavelli's The Prince.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Terrify the enemies, beat down the opponents of the regime, and to keep an eye on society more generally. The person who's chosen for that task also is an anomaly among Bolsheviks, that is a man of Polish aristocratic background, Felix Zerzhinski, who comes to be known by the nickname Iron Felix. Here's a man about whom a cult of personality also is created. Zerzhinski is celebrated in the Soviet period as the model of someone who's harsh but fair. An executioner, but with a heart of gold, somebody who loves children, somebody who has a tender heart but forces himself to be steely-willed against the opponents of the ideological project of the Bolsheviks.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He warned against Stalin's testimonies. Lenin fundamentally saw himself as irreplaceable. And so that doesn't really help in a succession struggle, right? Stalin is able to rely on a secret police apparatus that had been built up under Lenin already. And it's very early in the foundation of the Soviet state that the Chekha or the extraordinary commission is established as a secret police to”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, before getting to the secret police, Brawl his way into the Bolshevik party and dominate, he's co-opted and promoted to positions of importance by Lenin who sees him as a somewhat rough around the edges, not very sophisticated, much less cosmopolitan than other Bolsheviks, but dependable, reliable, and committed revolutionary. So I think that one of the things that's emerged, especially after archives opened up with the fall of the Soviet Union and we were able to read more and more of the communications of Lenin, is that it's not the case that we're talking here about an unconnected series of careers. Rather, there are connections to be made. It's true that towards the end of his life, Lenin came to be worried by complaints about Stalin's rudeness towards fellow Bolsheviks and in his testimony.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is delivering stirring speeches and theorizing Stalin works behind the scenes to control personnel decisions in the Bolshevik movement and in the state. And, you know, it's a clich ⁇ because it's true that personnel is policy. Trotsky is increasingly sidelined and then demonized and eventually expelled from the Soviet Union and later murdered in Mexico City. For Stalin eliminating his enemies turned out to be the solution that he was most comfortable with.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Radical, but as a moderate, a man who's a conciliator, someone who's calm when others are excited, someone who is able because of his organizational skills to resolve merely theoretical disputes with practical solutions. Now, to fully take this aboard, we have to unknow what we know from our vantage point about Stalin's leadership, Stalin's brutality in eliminating his opposition, the cult of personality that against all odds got built up around Stalin so successfully. And the absolute dominant role that led him later to be described as Genghis Khan with a telephone, a brutal dictator of ancient barbarism allied to the use of modern technology. While Trotsky”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A squeaky, somewhat high pitched voice, not well suited to revolutionary oratory. His face pockmarked with the scars of youthful illness, and who moreover doesn't speak a fine sophisticated Russian, but speaks a Russian heavily inflected with a Georgian accent from that part of the Russian Empire from which he came. And that was Stalin. And I know that you already have a marvelous interview with Stephen Kotkin, the brilliant biographer of Stalin, who has so many insights on that subject. The one thing that even after reading about Stalin that never ceases to surprise me, even in retrospect, is that Stalin gains a reputation not as a fire.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sideline because of his declining health, and there emerges a contest, a contest between a very charismatic leader, Leo Trotsky. On the one hand, who is an amazing orator, who is an intellectual, who has traveled widely in the world, who has seen much of the world, and who is a brilliant writer, a far-ranging intellect, and is seen as extremely radical because of his demand for permanent revolution, the acceleration of revolutionary processes to drive history forward, to strike while the iron is hot. And on the other hand, is an extremely unlikely contender for power. And that's a man who's probably the antithesis of charisma if you were to meet him in person. A guy with a”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of these unexpected turns that Lenin and his colleagues realize that they're in this for the long haul. It's necessary to wait longer. They don't lose hope in or confidence, you might say, in the eventual coming of international workers' revolution, but it's been deferred. It's been put off. And so the question then arises, what do you build within a state that's established called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics or the Soviet Union Lenin, as a result of an assassination attempt, is Deeply affected in his health and would have loved to continue for years longer to steer the regime, but”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Vision of tightly organized authoritarian rule. So communists who revolt in Germany are brutally suppressed by mercenaries, hardened front fighters and nationalist radicals hired by the German socialist government. And the result is a wound that just won't heal in the German socialist movement as a result of this fratricide. It frustrates Lenin's ambitions, so too does the fact that Poland, rather than going Bolshevik, resists attempts by the Bolsheviks to move forward and to connect up with Germany. The Poles yet again play a tremendously important historical role in changing the expected course of historical events. It's in the aftermath.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great disappointment follows Lenin, as we said, had expected that revolution will break out soon everywhere and all it will be necessary for the Bolsheviks to do having given the lead is to link up with others. And so he considered that what would be established would be a red bridge between a communist Russia and once Germany inevitably plunged ahead into its revolutionary transformation, a communist Germany. That doesn't end up happening. On the contrary, what happens in Germany is a out and out shooting war between different kinds of socialists. When Germany establishes a democracy that later goes by the name of the Weimar Republic, the government is a government of social democrats, moderate social democrats, who are fearful of what they see as Russian conditions of disorder and who are not necessarily in sympathy with the Leninist.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Against the odds leads the Bolsheviks to power in the Russian Civil War, where most betting people would have given them very slight odds of even surviving given how many enemies they faced off against. Lenin's insistence upon discipline and upon good organization allowed the Bolsheviks to emerge as the winners. And yet”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. For German sensibilities, for German nationalists, that treaty meant that Germany had essentially won World War I. And only a turn of events that many of them couldn't even follow or conceive of the arrival of American troops, the tipping of the balance in the West led to that reversal. One of the many scholars and contemporaries pointed out that Germany between the wars was full of people who were convinced that Germany had actually not lost the war. However, that victory of theirs was defined. So most definitely that groundwork is laid. And incidentally, this is something we can talk about later. World War I and World War II have a lot of linkages like that. And as time goes by, I think historians are going to focus on those linkages even more. But Lenin also, in his leadership,”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Lenin's supreme confidence leads the party through some really difficult steps that involves things like signing the humiliating treaty with the Germans, the Treaty of Breslatovsk, where critics of the Bolsheviks said that no one who loved their country would have agreed to so draconian, so harsh a settlement that saw the peeling off of large territories that had belonged to the Russian Empire. Lenin is willing to undertake this because the larger prize. He even says that he's not going to bother to read the treaty because shortly that treaty is going to be a dead letter. His expectation is revolution's going to break out everywhere, especially after we've raised the standard, first of all, in the wreckage of the Russian Empire.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. That's right. So prior generations of nihilists or populists had resemble Lenin's single-mindedness by arguing that one needed total devotion for this. This was to play this role in society, it was not enough to be somewhat committed, total commitment was necessary. And the other thing that's at work here, obviously, is If we consider Lenin affected by Marxist ideas and the homegrown Russian revolutionary tradition that predates the arrival of Marxist socialism in Russia, it's the theme of needing to adapt to local conditions. So Marxism or communism in Vietnam or in Cuba or in Cambodia or in Russia will be very different in its Local adaptations and local themes and resonance than it was in Germany where Marx would have expected all this to unfold.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Politic science. Philitus science and materialism. The Nihilists, some of them did a very bad job of hiding their political beliefs because they would wear, they were famous for wearing blue tinted spectacles, kind of the sunglasses of the late 19th century, as a way of shielding their eyes from light, but also having a dispassionate and realistic view of reality outside. So nihilists, as the name would suggest, do reject all prior certainties. but they make an exception for science and see that as the possibility for founding an entirely new mode of existence”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Existence where he's paired off other human elements quite deliberately in order to turn himself into an effective instigator of revolution. So when the opportunity comes in 1917, he's primed and ready for that role.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely irreconcilable enemy of the Tsarist regime and sets about turning himself into what you might call a guided missile for revolution. He turns himself into a machine to produce revolutionary change. I mean that with little hyperbole. Lenin at one point shared with friends that he loved listening to music, but he tried not to listen to beautiful music like Beethoven because it made him feel gentle. Whether revolution demanded was realism, hardness, absolute steely resolve. So Lenin worries even fellow revolutionaries by the intensity of his single-minded focus to revolution. He spends his days thinking about the revolution. He probably dreamt about the revolution. And so 24-7, it's an”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Been called the worst book ever written. It was, in fact, one of Lennon's favorite books in Russian it's Stodyelat in English It gets translated What is to be done? And it's a utopian novel about revolutionaries and how revolutionaries should act with one another in open ways, new ways, non-traditional ways in order to help usher in the coming revolution. Lenin loved the work and said it had the great merit of showing you how to be a revolutionary. So there's the Marxist influence and then there's Russian populist nihilist influence which is also a very live current in Lenin's thinking. And when you add these things together, you get an explosive mix because Lenin, as a result and part of this family trauma of his brother, becomes a”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dominated by the Tsarist establishment. It's harshness, its reactionary nature meant that people who in another context, in another country might have been reformers, could instead very easily be provoked into becoming revolutionaries. And Lenin is a perfect example of this because his older brother was executed as a result of being in a radical revolutionary movement who was arrested and executed for association with terrorism. And earlier generations of Russian radicals had founded populist groups that would aim to engage in terrorism and resistance against the Tsarist regime. And this included people who call themselves nihilists. And these nihilists were Materialists who saw themselves ushering in a new age by absolutely”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And it had antecedents. Even though Lenin and his colleagues are competing amongst each other for the title of most faithful disciple of Marx and Most True to the received theory in practice, there's other influences earlier influences that operate in the Russian context that were not operative, let's say, on the German context. And here you have to step back and think about the nature of Tsarism, which had maintained still into the 20th century the notion of a divine right to rule, that God had ordained the Tsarist system and its hierarchies, and that to question these was sinful and politically not advisable. And the restrictive nature of Russian society at this point.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The entire globe already was connected. And there's a chain of capitalist development that is connecting different countries so that the weakest link in the chain, if it breaks, if it pops open, it might actually inaugurate much bigger processes and start a chain reaction. And that's what he intended to do and has the chance to do in the course of 1917. Incidentally, just to get a sense of the sheer chaos and the human on an individual human level, what the absence of established authority meant, there's few works of literature that are as powerful as Baris Pasarnak's Dr. Jivago for giving the whole sweep of content. Forces in a power vacuum. It's an amazing testimony to that time and place.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was, although I think that he would have agreed that what was necessary was a cataclysm on the scale of the First World War to make this happen. The First World War shatters so many of the certainties of the 19th century that we talked about as a dynamic period with argument between ideologies. It scrambles all sorts of earlier debates. It renegotiates the status of the individual versus an all-powerful state and the claims of the state because to win or even just to survive in World War I, you need to centralize, centralize, centralize, and to put everything onto an authoritarian wartime footing in country after country. So Lenin earlier had already articulated Possibility that this might happen by talking about how”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In exile in Switzerland, Lenin had been despairing and had been convinced that he may not even live to see the advent of that day. But then when revolution does break out in the Russian Empire in February of 1917, Lenin is absolutely frantic to get back. And when he does get back, as a result of a deal that is negotiated with the German high command, a step that they'll later live very much to regret, he is able to get back and to go into action and to press for nothing less than the seizure of power that brings his Bolshevik faction, the radical wing of the socialist movement to power in, and then to build the Soviet Union.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It came to power as a result of stepping into a power vacuum. And the power vacuum was created by the First World War, the effect that it had as a total war, unprecedented pressure placed on a regime that in many ways was a traditional, almost feudal monarchy, only experiencing the beginnings of the modernization that the rest of Europe had undergone. And for this reason, communism comes to power in a place that Marx probably wouldn't have expected in the wreckage of the Russian Empire. Lenin is absolutely vital to this equation because he's the one who presses the process forward. Ironically, given the claim of communist leaders to having the key to history just a few months previous,”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“themselves with a working class in its struggle for communism, this sort of special role that they carved out for themselves is enormously appealing for intellectuals because any celebration of intellectuals as world movers is going to appeal to intellectuals. That gap, that frequent reality of not being in touch with the very classes that the communists are aiming to represent is a very frequent theme in this story. It also speaks to a crucial part of this story, which is the breaking apart or the civil war, the war of brother against brother, the fraternal struggle that splits socialism. and splits followers of Marx. And that's in the aftermath of Of the First World War in particular or during this traumatic experience, the way in which Lenin encourages”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is. I mean, at the same time, though, it kind of points to a further problem, and that's the identity of the revolutionaries. It turned out that many of these revolutionary movements and then the founding elites of communist countries in the aftermath of the Soviet seizure of power turn out to be something quite different from people who have spent their lives in factories experiencing the industrial revolution firsthand. There's a special role here for intellectuals. And when Marx and Engels write into the communist manifesto, the notion that certain exceptional individuals can rise above their class origins in a way other people can't and transcend their earlier role, their materially determined role in order to gain a perspective on the historical process as a whole.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Governments will essentially be able to run themselves. And the model he had in mind, oddly enough, was Swiss post offices. Being in Swiss exile must have impressed him so much with the orderliness and the sheer discipline and rationality of a Swiss post office. And he thought, why can't you organize governments like this where you don't need political leaders? You don't need grand visions. You have procedures. You have bureaucracy, which does its job in a way that's not alienating but simply produces the greatest good. When you think of experiences with bureaucracy in the 20th century, once hair stands on end to have the comparative naivete on display with a prediction like that, but it derives from that confidence that it's all going to be okay because we understand.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Brought on by capitalist competition, poverty, and economic cycles and depressions brought on by capitalist competition, the inequalities of societies that remain hierarchical and class-based. And this claim to being cutting-edge science, I think allows people like Lenin to derive immense confidence in the prescription that they have for the future. And that paradoxically, the confidence that you have in broad strokes, the right set of answers for how to get to the future also allows you to take huge liberties with the tactics and the strategies that you follow as long as your ultimate goal remains the one sketched by this master plan. So, you know. Ultimately, some of the predictions of someone like Lenin that once society has reached that stage of the dictatorship of the proletariat, The notion that”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Intellectual elites more generally, processes of secularization, not total secularization, but processes of secularization in Western industrial societies. And the sense that here's a doctrine that will allow escape from wars.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So much of the compelling case for communism came from the confidence that people in the West more generally placed in science, the notion that science is answering problems. Science is giving a solutions to how the world around us works, how the world around us can be improved. Some varieties of that, and I watch the quotation mark, science were crazy, right? Like phrenology, so-called scientific racism that tried to divide humanity up into discrete blocks and to manipulate them in ways that were allegedly scientific or rational. So there were horrors that followed from those invocations of science, but its prestige was enormous. And that in part had to do with the lessening grip of religious ideas on”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, clearly, it was a compelling case for millions of people. And part of this story has to do with, overall, has to do with the faith, conviction, stories of people sacrificing themselves as well as their countrymen in a cause that they believed was not just legitimate, but demanded their total obedience. I think that throughout the early part of the 20th century, the late 19th century, early part of the 20th century,”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Want to take an anthropological perspective in the history of communism and to take very seriously those people who avow that they are communists. And this is the project that they have underway. And then after hearing that avowal, I think as a historian, you have to say, well, let's look at the details. Let's see what changes have been made, what continuities might still exist, whether there's a larger pattern to be discerned here. So it's a very, very complicated history that we're talking about.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or, when you reach the point where some shift or some adaptation is so radically different that it actually breaks with the tradition. And that's an insoluble problem. You probably have to take it on a case-by-case basis. It speaks to issues like the question that gets raised today, like, is China in a meaningful sense a communist country anymore? And there's a diversity of opinion on this score. Or, you know, if you're looking at the history of communism and you look at North Korea, which now is on its third installment of a dynastic leader from the same family who rules like a god king over a regime that calls itself communist, is that still a form of communism? Is it an evolution of? Is it a complete reversal of? I tend to...”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have a dominant political class, the Communist Party of China, which is allowing economic development and private enterprise as long as it retains political control. Some of these elements already represent divergences from what Marx would have expected. And this points to a really key problem or question for all of the history of communism. It has to do with it being a tradition in spite of itself. And that could be expressed in the following way. An original set of ideas is going to evolve. It's going to change because circumstances change. What elaborations of any doctrine, whether it's communism or a religious doctrine or any political ideology, what elaborations are natural stages in the evolution? Of any living set of ideas.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Marxist dialectical materialism grounds itself in these economic realities and the political prescription is supposed to flow from the economic realities and be inevitably growing out of them. In the real history of communist regimes, you've actually seen periods where the economics becomes detached from the politics. And I'm thinking in particular of the new economic period early in the history of the Soviet Union, when Lenin realizes that the economy is so far gone that you need to reintroduce or allow in a limited way some elements of private enterprise just to start getting Russia back on course in order to have the accumulation of surplus that will be necessary to build the project at all. And there are many Bolsheviks who see the new economic program as a new economic policy as a terrible compromise and a betrayal of their ideas, but it's seen as necessary for a short while. And then Stalin will wreck it entirely. Or consider for that matter China today, where”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“School history teachers that Marxism was just a theoretical construct that was the idle production of a philosopher who was not connected to the world and was never meant to be tried in practice. Marx would have been furious to hear this. And it's almost heroically wrong as a historical statement because Marx insisted that all previous philosophers have theorized about reality. What now is really necessary is to change it. So you could say that in the abstract, a Marxist economist can certainly use Marxist theoretical framework to compare to a given economic reality. But Marx would have seen that as incomplete and as deeply unsatisfactory. There's kind of a footnote to all of this, which is that even though”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think that Marx would probably have responded that, in fact, those things are indivisible. The analysis as sort of purely theoretical certainly can be performed on any economic reality that you care to mention. But the imperatives that grow out of that economic analysis are political. and Engels emphasize the unity of theory and practice. So it's not enough to dispassionally analyze. It's a call to action as well. Because if you've delivered the answer to how history evolves and changes, it obligates you, right? It demands certain action. You sometimes hear from undergraduates that they've heard from their high school.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And is intended to be a pragmatic, practical statement of how this is to play out. And starts in part with those ringing words about a ghost or a spectre haunting Europe, the specter of communism, which wasn't true at the time, but decades later most definitely is the case.”
2024-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source