Soviet Animation - INTERPLANETARY REVOLUTION (1924),Eng.Subs

The Soviets were so cool. Do you understand how many years before it's time this animation is if it was really made in 1924?
Besides, this is a bit like modern art.

I rather like the artwork, but the story and symbolism are beyond childish and uncivilized, they are examples of outrageous moral horror. It's amazing how much anti-business bigotry goes by without comment. Replace Jews with "capitalists" and no one would be smiling, here. This is truly vile stuff.

Hold on, that is not an enlightening comparison. There is a difference between villifying a set of people for what they chose to do, rather than who they happen to be, by natural chance. I'm not a communist, so I don't endorse that aspect of the film's message. But if a group of people have *chosen* to do dreadful things to other people, it is far less morally reprehensible to single them out for ostrcization.

Just to emphasise, I do not share their view of a capitalist's ethics. But, taken in its historical context, I think it is more understandable why they held that view. The damage wrought by unfettered free markets and international commerce had played a large part in the colonial scramble and First World War, and the major capitalist powers had just attempted to invade Russia.

The people you are defending (Soviet leaders, in effect, since they corralled the artists into their vile nonsense) went ahead and starved millions of people in their attempt to make their crank economic policy work. Both Lenin and Stalin were power mad. And they cannot be excused because "capitalist" powers invaded their country. Nation-states are capitalists. It is nation-states who conscripted their men and sent thousands upon thousands to die in a horrible war. Capitalists lack that power.

I have already stressed that I am not defending them, and nor do I endorse their views. (Also, be careful-there was censorship but also a lot of free naievete on the part of Bolshevik artists.) I am not, repeat, *not* a communist. I am afraid I cannot undertand your statement that "nation-states are capitalists." Capitalists are a set of individual human beings who share relevant characteristics, whereas a nation-state is a geographically-defined political entity.

Those wars certainly were begun and conducted by the governments of nation-states, but to understand the history of that era is to understand the extent to which geopolitical agent's actions were constrained and facilitated by international finance, which included immensely powerful monopolies at that time (Polanyi is good on that).
But I am seeking to understand here, not defend. And I still don't believe your original analogy enlightens historical understanding.

p.s. recall that the worst excesses of the Soviet system occurred after this film was made. Stalin was just taking over after Lenin at this time, and the purges and show-trials were still to come. In fact, at this time, the NEP was improving the economy from a quasi-feudal base. Of course, you had the Red Terror, but that was in the context of a Civil War and actual, serious foreign subversion. At the very least, it was yet to become clear that the system couldn't survive without terror.

The swastika featrue is interesting, as others have said here, especially associated so strongly with capitalist icons - would the pre-nazi Freikorps have such a connection? Still a bit of a knock for the Indians who'd used the symbol for millenia and pretty much couldn't from the 1920s onwards

Interesting Cartoon,I don't know how E.T. would have received a Communist Revolution! LOL :)))