I have been listening to Mike Duncan’s Revolutions podcast for awhile and have been loving it. So far, the Haitian season might be my favorite but the Mexican one has been pretty good, too. I’d highly recommend it to everyone interested in history so far. Although hearing about all the failed leftist revolutions from 1848 has been very depressing lol.

Anyway, I’m about to finish the Mexican Revolution season and am wondering, for people who have listened to this podcast who are communists, socialists, and/or anarchists, what do you think of the rest of the podcast - which looks to be all the Russian Revolution?

So far, the podcast has been surprisingly radicalizing, but I heard that Mike himself is more of a centrist and is personally critical of communism and Lenin.

He’s earned enough goodwill from me up to now for me to listen to it anyway, it’s not like I need all my media to be communist propaganda (or I could never watch anything). Plus, I’m sure they did make a ton of mistakes back then. But, I’m mostly just wondering what I’m about to get into here exactly.

Even handed critiques of the revolutionaries but also with appropriate context, like the Haiti or French Revolution season? A bit of emotional bias but with mostly accurate facts? Missing context and reframing of Cold War red scare propaganda? Or he’s been radicalized more than I thought and he turns into a communist this season? How good is it, and how does it rank with other seasons?

Should I ask the same thing in Lemmygrad, too? Looking for leftist history nerd opinions, because I haven’t seen them on the other site on this season specifically. Also, any supplemental reading or stuff to watch to better understand this final, giant section of the podcast, especially if it explores facts or perspectives he isn’t already going to get into? Let me know!

Tl;dr: bolded parts

  • panopticon [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    6·
    7 months ago

    He loves to say perrrmanent revolution and (imo) downplays the roles of Lenin and especially Stalin before and during the October revolution, really seems intent on making Trotsky the protagonist, doesn’t really deal with Lenin’s writings or theories, and makes it seem like Marx formulated the original labor theory of value, but other than that it gives a decent account of the sequence of events and the interconnected movements that gave rise to the revolution. I also felt like he did a good job of explaining the motivations and necessity of the Bolshevik takeover, mainly the provisional government continuing to drag the country through WWI. I might give it another listen, see if I feel the same way about it.