Prof. Tim Snyder Participates in University of New Haven's Russian Revolution Centennial Series
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- čas přidán 22. 05. 2024
- Timothy Snyder, the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University, presents "Russian Counter-Revolutionary Thought: A Century after the Revolution." as part of the University of New Haven's Russian Revolution Centennial series. The talk took place on November 7, 2017.
A frequent contributor to the New York Times, with guest appearances on TED talks, CNN, NPR, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, and many others, Professor Snyder is an internationally acclaimed and award-winning historian and author of several best-selling books on the Holocaust, Hitler, and Stalin. His most recent book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017), has been at the top of the New York Times best-seller list for nine months.
Thank you Prof. Snyder for all your hard work on these issues.
Can't believe this was 4 years ago.
Yes, I am very grateful for the relentlessly HARD WORK that Dr. Snyder does to IN-FORM us; we
would never have the time or impetus, I 'spect, to do all the reading and studying that he has been
willing to do for all these years - and to share all this with us so openly and generously!! Not usual
from any Ivy League prof I've ever been aware of! So - HATS OFF to this kind and thoughtful man!!
This lecture was poor as Tim is not a scholar of the Russian Revolution. You would learn more from specialists, such as Mark D. Steinberg, Laura Engelstein, Sheila Fitzpatrick and Alexander Rabinowitch. Tim as a bad habit of pushing modern day events into the past and then getting carried away with his own political views than focusing on the history. This video was largely based on Putin and Stalinism. There was nothing mentioned about the Russian revolutions or its people.
archive.org/details/mark-d-steinberg-the-russian-revolution-audio
When my kids think of me as wasting time on the internet, I don't think they understand that I watch things like Dr. Snyder's lectures.
Thank you for putting this up. It's important more people get to hear this.
Watching this 5 years later after the invasion of Ukraine, this talk rings truer and more relevant than when it was first uploaded.
I'just watched it today. I've been listening to a lot of Snyder and Masha Gessen ever since the invasion. Both are able to assess the current situation in the US with logic, historical perspective and sanity, often pointing out obvious things that I had been unable to put into words.
This guy is a genius with some kind of zen ego.
The paltry number of likes on this inspired lecture is jaw-dropping.
Snyder was at his best in this session. He sometimes suffers from verbal diarrhea but not this time.
He summarized Trump particularly well. I hope criminal investigations get to the bottom of it. Trump needs prison time. We need to send the message to those who might decide to follow his trail. Could the Russians do this again? I doubt it.
Adding some clarifications to the content discussed, it is urgent to point out that the “success” of Stalin - the man who used to boast of having taken the U.R.S.S. "from the plow to the atomic bomb in just one generation" - compared to Gorbachev's failure shows that a socialist economy is unable to function with a minimum of efficiency without requiring a massive dose of political violence. In an attempt to reform a decadent regime, Gorbachev proceeded more quickly with the process of political openness in the hope of removing the predictable resistance that the Soviet bureaucracy would create to economic reform measures, as was fully proven by the failed coup attempt. in the USSR in August 1991 - which ended up precipitating the final crisis of socialism and the dissolution of the USSR itself. Having restored several freedoms (creed, expression, organization, party, etc.) that had been abolished in his country since the time of Vladimir Lenin, Gorbachev's opening process can be defined as a kind of attempt to "deleninize" the U.R.S.S.
While Gorbachev went ahead with his policy of "one step forward" (towards capitalism) and two steps back (back to socialism), his Chinese parallel - Deng Xiaoping - adopted a logic diametrically opposed to that of Gorbachev: he prioritized the achievement of economic prosperity (adopting capitalism in practice) precisely to delay any attempt at political opening, as was evident with the acceleration of the economy. reforms after the Tiananmen Square massacre.
It is important to note that it was Karl Marx himself who, in his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, discerned the scenario in which the conditions for a social revolution process are formed, describing it as follows:
“At a certain stage in its development, the material productive forces of society contradict existing production relations or - which is just their legal expression - with the property relations in which they have operated until then. From the forms of development of the productive forces, these relations are transformed into fetters of them. So, it is a time of social revolution. '*
By rejecting the pursuit of profit maximization as an instrument to stimulate innovation, socialist countries ended up condemning themselves to obsolescence. Thus, they lost the chance to incorporate the productivity gains made possible by technological progress. That is why the capitalist countries managed to provide a greater rise in the standard of living of their population, even without pursuing the egalitarian ideal. Therefore, until the “final crisis of socialism” (to paraphrase K. Marx's own definitions once again), it was only a matter of time. But religious fanatics do not give up on their faith, even against the indisputable proof of the facts, which completely refute it!
What has always happened to human society since the time of chipped stone is that technological development does not require human beings to dedicate themselves to certain activities, which start to be carried out in a more intensive way, with increased productivity of decline in the contingent of hand. -employed labor, eliminating certain jobs with the aid of the developed technology. But the jobs eliminated are offset by the increased employment of labor in more technologically developed sectors.
This is basically what happened when the advent of the Industrial Revolution helped to increase the productivity of the extractive and agricultural sector - notably from the advent of agro-industry - while reducing the need for the employment of human labor in these sectors. , which makes up the primary sector of the economy. At the same time, the Industrial Revolution moved the economically active population to the secondary sector of the economy (handicrafts, industry and manufacturing).
This process was first noticed by the Austrian economist Joseph Alois Schumepeter, who defined it as a kind of "creative destruction" - that is: technological progress destroys job opportunities in some sectors, but also creates new opportunities in other sectors!
The problem is that Schumpeter was a pessimist, who detested the Soviet regime, but strongly believed that he embodied the "future of humanity". Schumpeter did not realize that he had found the key to explain why capitalism does not self-destruct in an immense crisis of overproduction, as K. Marx predicted it would happen: instead, it evolves, creating the conditions for the overcoming of technological civilization. industrial and the subsequent advent of a technological civilization of a post-industrial character, in the same way as the Industrial Revolution had already done with the agricultural or pre-industrial civilization.
Therefore, we can conclude that from the invention of the first chipped stone tools to artificial intelligence and space travel, human history is not driven by a notorious and highly questionable "class struggle", but by technological progress: since it discovered how handling fire and producing tools, including the wheel, human evolution has become more technological and less biological, unlike other animals. The main reason for this phenomenon is that, with the help of the technology we have created, the human race has gradually become less subject to the limitations imposed by nature. It was by obstructing this mechanism of human evolution - disregarding the importance of maximizing profit in an industrial technological society - that the so-called "socialist mode of production" proved unable not only to compete with capitalism, but even to survive. Therefore, it is easy to deduce that this is a mere question of TIME until the so-called "21st century socialism" in Venezuela ends up following the same path as its counterpart of the last century. However, if there are still economic reforms, it is possible that it will survive for some time.
To paraphrase Marx once again, it can be said with certainty that socialism is a system full of contradictions, which bears the germ of its own destruction: it is the system that digs its own grave!
* Reproduced according to MARX, K. Preface to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, organized by Florestan Fernandes and published under the title K. Marx: Teoria e processo histórico da revolução social, In Marx & Engels, Great Social Scientists Collection , História, vol. 36. São Paulo: Ática, 1983. p. 232. Edição comemorativa do centenário da morte de Karl Marx.
Obs .: Adaptation made from a text of my authorship published in issue nº 72 of the Magazine of the Brazilian Association of Intellectual Property - RABPI in September 2014.
Starts at 5:43
In Boulgakov's The Master and Margarita, a previously unknown character named Woland, therefore German, arrives to disrupt the Soviet Union. It turns out he is Satan in disguise. Would Boulgakov possibly have known about the ideas of Iline???
excellent yideo
Every talk like this, someone asks, "Is the US an oligarchy?" Every developed country is an oligarchy.
Every talk like this someone asks, "What can we do?" Start by unplugging from the internet, go for a walk, look around, talk to people, read a book, go for a run, go for a swim, watch the birds, watch kids playing, ask a younger person a question, listen, think about what they said. Start by connecting to the real world. Now you at least have a chance to make a decent decision.
Ignore public affairs and let your betters do their jobs? That is not at all what citizens of a republic have traditionally been expected to do.
We have a whole new sector of the economy that exists because some of the income of business is spent on IT (computers and software). It is advances in computer technology / automation that has powered the growth of productivity. If productivity had increased because people spent time at union meetings discussing how to better manage the flow of work, it would make sense to expect that labor would be capturing the productivity gains.
Some of the decline in the clout of labor can be understood from the perspective that labor overplayed its hand. When global trade opened up, the overpriced labor lost out to lower-paid workers in other nations. This could have been prevented by keeping trade barriers high. But that is tantamount to saying that the rest of the world should not develop. It seems a highly arrogant position.
ANYONE who is concerned that economic stress can be politicized might consider joining a call for equal sharing of natural wealth. Make industries pay in proportion to pollution, resource depletion and habitat destruction. Share the proceeds equally to all. Promote sustainability AND end abject poverty.
Thought lecturers weren't supposed to air their political opinions in class.
Equal parts insight and pure Establishment bullshit piffle. I’ll leave to the listener to sort which is which out of the sententious spew of Professor Snyder’s quasi-philosophical lecture.
Presumably you object to his cynical view of Donald Trump's career. I don't specifically know that his fortunes were revived by rich, well connected Russians (though he is a known slavophile), but do think that efforts to turn Americans against each other are definitely advantageous to our enemies (and it is currently hard to characterize the Russian government as anything else). To that extent, my unwritten satire "exposing" the John Birch Society as a Communist front (using its own logic) rings truer in my mind as the years roll on.
I should note that Donald Trump was far from being universally admired before becoming a politician (my own decidedly negative views of him date to the early 1990s).