Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler | Lex Fridman Podcast #444

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0:00 – Introduction
3:10 – Marxism
30:55 – Anarchism
45:52 – The Communist Manifesto
54:51 – Communism in the Soviet Union
1:14:45 – Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin
1:24:33 – Stalin
1:31:48 – Holodomor
1:45:38 – The Great Terror
1:58:39 – Totalitarianism
2:09:40 – Response to Darryl Cooper
2:24:49 – Nazis vs Communists in Germany
2:31:11 – Mao
2:36:19 – Great Leap Forward
2:43:20 – China after Mao
2:48:52 – North Korea
2:52:56 – Communism in US
3:00:26 – Russia after Soviet Union
3:11:57 – Advice for Lex
3:19:39 – Book recommendations
3:22:38 – Advice for young people
3:29:29 – Hope

Transcript:
https://lexfridman.com/vejas-liulevicius-transcript

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EPISODE LINKS:
Vejas's Courses: https://www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/vejas-gabriel-liulevicius
Vejas's Books: https://amzn.to/4e3R1rz
Vejas's Audible: https://adbl.co/4esRrHt

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Correct me if I'm wrong, but I read somewhere Marx was Jewish, not German. Perhaps a German born Jew.

Terrific interview! (I own the professor's Great Courses lectures on Eastern Europe and have seen them numerous times.)

Lol that part about the never ending German war in the east is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard in my life, you could ask a 12 year old and they’d tell you that’s obviously not true.

What is the source for that? So many insane fake stories about national socilaist Germany,

Couldn't make it through intro. Terrible 😊

Engle started paying for Marx's bills when Marx's parent stopped paying his bills

Another propagandist, like most of Western historians. These guys tell one story, the actual archives tell another. I wonder, whose advantage does it serve to demonize a country where money lenders were illegal?

Excellent topic and erudite delivery. As a half-Lithuanian respect for his tidbits on Soviet Lithuania which I visited in 80s also.

how is it possible to call the Nazi's perception of Bolshevism as a Jewish scheme to overthrow the world as "total nonsense" 2:02:30 when in fact 80+% of all leading figures of Bolshevism during the Revolution were, in fact…*check notes*… JEWS? When it looks like a dog, and barks like a dog it most likely is not a stingray.
All I see here are a jew and a crypto-jew talking 3.5hrs about Communism but mentioning Judaism only when the bad Nathzees made them some dudu on the head. Ridiculous, only NPCs fall for that.

WW3 … is … how it ends 😱.

Good thing this is history and not occurring right now right in front of us as we speak.

@lexfridman i hope you'd see this Lex, you need to host Emeritus Prof. Sean Sayers from University of Kent. You need to listen political theories from him as well. He studied at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford and holds a PhD from the University of Kent. He has written extensively on topics in social philosophy, ethics, theory of knowledge, metaphysics from a Hegelian‑Marxist perspective. It would be quite interesting to see another PoV.

I can't speak to the history, but his description of Marxist philosophy is obviously wrong to the point it's hard to imagine he is read on the subject – which might not be a surprise since he isn't a philosopher. At the very least, I've never heard or read of similar interpretations as what he talks about. The idea that Marx ever talked about a "final revolution" or "end of history" is not only wrong – it's the opposite of what was being talked about by Marx. The obvious example "the critique of the gotha program" , one of the only texts in which Marx wrote prescriptively about the future (something he rarely did as his focus was mostly on critique), illustrates that Marx envisioned an on-going struggle based on the material needs of people and their means. It notably does not include the idea that there would be no poverty, etc. So I have no idea what texts this 'professor' has read. There is no such thing as Utopia – there is only progress. What Marx did hope for was for an end of class-struggle because that was, in his view, the only way to solve the contradictions within capitalism.

Perhaps it may make some kind of betterment in communication and hopefully power not being misdirected if you say "do nit let this sway tou from doing the right thing". Google morning

8:05 can someone explain the joke please 😅

Does any of this sound familiar, because it should.

Fascism was a defensive reaction to world revolutionary Communism. If you leave that aspect out — the most important part of Fascism as Mussolini was first a Marxist During the start of Giovanni Gentile’s intellectual career before he became the “philosopher of Fascism”, he wrote two monographs on the Philosophy of Karl Marx one in 1897 and the other in 1899. These essays were written less than two decades after Marx’s death in 1883 and show even in his early 20’s that Gentile had a keen understanding of Philosophy and the movements of his time.

What perhaps makes Gentile’s criticism of Marx so interesting is that he and Marx are both coming out of the same tradition of German idealism and both had a deep understanding of Hegel while they likewise both had their criticisms of Hegel and other German idealists. So Gentile understands Marx better intellectually than nearly all modern so-called anti-Marxists do (and as a side note: most Marxists as well) and isn’t just going to try and debunk the Communist manifesto by professing the so-called greatness of capitalism to maximize an individual's pleasure while warning about the dangers of “big government”. What makes Gentile’s insights and criticisms so refreshing from the glut of low IQ takes on Marxism is that he really takes Marx at his own terms and shows the integral flaws of Marx’s philosophical doctrine just by referencing material Marx himself has written.and Karl Korsch 1940
The Fascist Counter-revolution Indeed, in many ways that counterrevolutionary aftermath of 1848 is comparable to the infinitely more serious and more extended counterrevolutionary movement through which European society is passing today after the experience of the Russian, the German, and the other European revolutions which followed in the wake of the First World War. Every party and every political tendency had to go through a certain period of bewilderment until it had adapted itself to a totally changed situation. Marx himself, although he utterly despised the imperialist adventurer because of his personal inadequacy, was inclined to believe in the revolutionary significance of the counterrevolutionary coup. He described the historical outcome of the two years of revolutionary defeat from 1848 to 1849 by the paradoxical statement that "this time the advance of the revolutionary movement did not effect itself through its immediate tragicomic achievements but, the other way round, through the creation of a united and powerful counterrevolution, through the creation of an antagonist by opposing whom the party of revolt will reach its real revolutionary maturity." And even after the fateful event he most emphatically restated his conviction that "the destruction of the parliamentary republic contains the germs of the triumph of the proletarian revolution." This is exactly what the German Communists and their Russian masters said 80 years later when they welcomed the advent of Nazism in Germany as a "victory of revolutionary communism." https://www.marxists.org/archive/korsch/1940/fascist-counterrrevolution.htm

1:14:49 that isn't even trotsky, that's kalinin 🤦‍♀

What did dennis Prager say? All 'ism's were created by who?! If there is to be a world govt, it should be ruled by ALL collectives, not just one!

Suppose you were a farmhand without any rights whatsoever, then becoming an employee in an agrarian corporation might seem like a good choice to you. btw: The production in russian villages was traditionally already organised in very collectivist ways, only they weren't exactly the soviet ways…

Marx would probably have been supportive of national socialism, judging from his writing about jews, which sound like inspiration for Hitler

Thank you! I'm late in watching, but this is in my collection of best vids.

Why we cannot get the people of today to give up on the idea of socialism today tells me they dont really know its history.