As a communist, Atrioc is my favourite non-communist political commentator.
That might sound condescending but I truly think his reasoning is great and better than most communists I interact with and observe.
I enjoyed the segment where he talked specifically through his thoughts on the capitalist system and I actually agreed with quite a lot of it. I think the crux of our disagreement is his ideas concerning bureaucracy and degeneracy.
He made the argument that you need a balance of powers between capital, the state, and labor. As a communist I believe that the existing state is the composition of bourgeois intellectuals who manage the capitalist system, and the ideal would instead be a state composed of the proletariat represented by organic intellectuals (only representation with far more safeguards against bureaucracy than is seen in current states and the USSR) where capital is cut out of the picture (abolition of property).
I think groups will always trend toward degeneracy but, like Atrioc, that it can be mitigated, only I think with revolutionary vigor in the masses and safeguards against bureaucracy (worker soviets that aren't subordinated to the party, for instance). Revolution won't always succeed but there is nothing better to do under the boot of the current system.
I don't really know why I'm posting this. It's kind of an appreciation post I guess. This is probably the most gleeful I've been trying to start a discussion related to communism since I became one.
And to leave with a final point: Mamdani is a democratic socialist (as defined by Engels in the Principles of Communism); he will leave New York just as capitalist as it was before. Is that really all we want from him? Work will still suck. You will still have nothing to do other than work. A majority of people on Earth will still live miserable lives in the peripheral. This is the main reason I'm not content putting 'effort' (the kind described by Atrioc in the video) into the current system, I'd rather put effort into a system following revolution.
