While they are not explicitly leftist, I feel Rare Earth occasionally makes videos that would fit in this thread, their most recent one talking about the difficulties a developing country has with capitalism
The channel has a lot of videos covering the stories of developing countries and how they feel the effects of imperialism and capitalism.
The series is made by Evan Hadfield, son of the astronaut Chris Hadfield which more people are probably familiar with.
Thanks for sharing. That's a good video because it offers a fairly concise and clear example of the effects of free trade/imperialism in one developing country. It's important for people to understand the wide ranging implications of something that seems innocous, like a health food fad.
Still, I would agree that it's not a completely lefty video. You can still hear that the presenter (Evan?) still explicitly accepts the positives of capitalist system:
- He talks about entering into the global marketplace as something that's disruptive in the short term, but that it will be good over time. I guess my question would "good for who?" - not the majority of the population currently working their own farm land and who would be forced into wage labour. Presumably good for a few small businesses who clean up.
- He says modern imperialism/neo-imperalism "isn't by definition bad". Uh, I think it is because it siphons yet more wealth out of the global south into the north at the expense of the lives of all the people it disrupts/makes homeless/kills with poverty.
- He says "The pattern isn't created to harm developing nations or steal bread from the mouths of the poor". Again, between the WTO, so called "free trade agreements", patent law, IMF/World Bank structural readjustments, loose capital control, western backed government coups etc it's pretty clear that the entire global economic system is crafted to exploit global south countries in as many ways as possible. The idea that the system is somehow "neutral" in the face of all evidence to the contrary is a little ridiculous.