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April 17, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
31:44
194 Marxist Exploitation
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Good afternoon everybody, it's Steph.
I hope you're doing well. It is almost twenty past five on April the 17th, 2006.
So, we're going to continue on with Marxism a little bit here.
I am no, obviously, I'm no expert in Marxism in the same way that I'm no expert in Episcopalianism.
Episcopalianism? In Methodism, because, you know, you don't really have to go too far into a particular belief, in my view, to realize that it's just not correct.
This is one of the reasons why I don't become an expert in the religion of Set, the ancient Egyptian god of the underworld or something, because, you know, once you kind of get the basics of religion, you don't have to dip into each of these too much.
And also, I mean, rightly or wrongly, I do have...
When it comes to sociological or moral theories, I do...
I do sort of have a sensitivity towards how people live.
I mean, I'm very sensitive towards hypocrisy, which is why I strive my best to avoid it as much as possible to varying degrees of success.
But I try not to give advice that I myself have not taken.
I try not to talk about things from an ethical standpoint that I myself have not had some experience with, and I certainly don't give instructions that are contradictory to my way of living.
And so in the sort of history of Marx, I do have a certain amount of problem just with the man himself.
I do think that if you're going to tell people how they should live, which is a challenging enough thing to do to begin with, it probably would be wise for you to take that for a test drive.
It would be wise, I think, to take it for a spin and just, you know, see if it works.
So, for instance, if you feel that to work is very important, to work for something which is socially beneficial, to work productively is important...
Then it might be a good idea to actually have a job at some point in your life.
And, of course, Marx and Engels, not so much.
I mean, Marx inherited his father's textile mills and was not bad at managing them, but certainly didn't start an industrial concern up from the ground.
He just got a bomb with a silver spoon in his mouth, so to speak.
And Marx...
Never did an honest day's work in his life.
I mean, I'm not saying the man didn't work in a library.
I mean, I worked as a writer for 20 years before stumbling on podcasts as the better way to get ideas out, but I certainly didn't expect to be paid for those 20 years simply because I was working very hard.
I mean, for most of my life, I basically had two jobs, which is a writer and a guy who works for a living.
And so I just find it kind of appalling to me that Marx is going to write, you know, he who does not toil shall not eat and, you know, have all of this tough stuff around being a worker and the proletariat and the workers and so on, when he, of course, in terms of voluntary exchange of value in a market situation, never really worked in his life.
So he was completely subsidized by Engels, who was completely subsidized by his father's own capitalist interests.
So it just seems to me kind of funny that when you look at somebody who's claiming that exploitation of the workers is bad, that all of the money that he's siphoning out of Engels' textile mills is not going to the workers in salary.
I mean, I just think that's kind of funny and so obvious that You would have a tough time taking anything that somebody said about economics seriously, unless their economics theory was that you should find some sugar daddy and settle yourself down and just try and milk them for as much money as possible, and so on. That, to me, would be, at least you'd respect the man for his consistency.
But if you're interested in not having the workers be exploited, then it would seem to me that It would be somewhat reasonable to not hang off the wages or the profits of a textile manufacturer wherein he could be sort of conceivably otherwise spending the money he's giving to you to support you and your family on the workers themselves.
So it's a little tough for me to understand where he's coming from in terms of the, I mean, again, but this is, as I mentioned this morning, this is sort of Psychological acting out, so to speak, in that this is a man who is parasitical upon the workers, and so he has a great deal of rage against it.
I mean, it's a sort of projection.
I mean, it's a basic psychological effect of these kinds of immature personality.
Now... The other thing is that he disowned the child that he had by his maid, did not allow it to live in the house because he was afraid of social condemnation, which, from my standpoint, does not make him look terribly like a revolutionary, but rather just sort of like a sleazy, deadbeat, sicko dad, myself.
You know, that's sort of my particular perspective.
And, you know, last but not least, I guess there's two other things that are important.
One is that he ended up selling out the names of other revolutionaries to the police, to the secret police, the Prussian secret police, I can't remember exactly, for 25 bucks a head, and made some good money at that.
That story's been in pretty wide circulation since about 1960.
You probably haven't heard about it, that he was a paid informant for the secret police.
Again, not somebody that I would look at as an entirely moral or honorable entity who has the right to sort of explain to me how best to live and how, you know, my false consciousness and consumer or product fetishness is alienating my work or labor from the whatever,
whatever, right? I mean, I would just say to somebody like this, no matter how big his beard is and how Old Testament he happens to look, That it might be worthwhile getting your own house in order before you run around lecturing everybody on how to behave and what they should do and the true facts of reality that only you can perceive and the moral nature of mankind and all this kind of stuff.
And the other thing...
I mean, there's more, of course, but last but not least, I would sort of say that if you have three children, you have three daughters who survive, these are the legitimate ones, so you have three daughters who survive into adulthood.
And you're a stay-at-home dad for the most part.
I mean, you're not out there working for a living.
And so you get a chance to spend some real quality time with them.
You can't say, well, I couldn't spend any time with them because I had to go work down the mill or down the mine or something like that.
And so it's kind of hard for me to understand when you look at the results of Marx's own parenting.
And I think this stuff is fairly important.
I mean, you learn a lot about somebody by looking at their kids, in my opinion, except my parents.
His daughters, three of them grew to adulthood, and two of them committed suicide.
Gotta tell you, I don't think that Marx was a very good father himself, because if you're a stay-at-home dad, you obviously have quite a bit of interaction with your children, and so if two out of three end up committing suicide, I just got to tell you, I would have some questions, put together with everything else.
I would sort of have some questions about the man's basic character, and so I would have some questions about his ability to tell the world how it should behave and how it should organize itself, and so on.
I mean, just sort of on a minor side note, the fact that he gets two-thirds of the way through Volume 3 of Desk Capital before defining something called class, which is the very opening line of the Communist Manifesto, right?
The history of all, hitherto existing societies has been the history of class struggle, blah, blah, blah.
Well, it would be helpful, I think, to define a class.
Now, I would say that Marx would have a certain amount of hesitation defining class because he would be part of the intellectual parasitical class and so on.
But that kind of intellectual rigor, which was pretty much absent from Marxist writing, it's mostly ad hominem and this kind of stuff.
And the other thing is that he was, you know, from the age of 49 onwards, he never really published anything other than a couple of pamphlets.
He lived for another 16 years and immersed himself in pretty random studies.
They found, what was it, three cubic meters of Russian statistics in his study after he died.
And, you know, this world-famous revolutionary genius guy, I mean, Engels wrote this big moving tribute to his funeral, and like nine people showed up.
And, again, you know, the measure of a man is not determined by the number of people at his funeral, otherwise Princess Diana would be a saint, but...
There is some, you know, when you put all of these things together, along with his constant fights with Bakunin and his constant fights with everyone that he ever had any kind of movement with, any kind of revolutionary movement with, you know, his history as a young alcoholic, I mean, it just all looks pretty messy.
His satanic verses, he wrote a play about Satan very positively, you know, just somebody who's not A very healthy individual mentally, not somebody who has quality relationships.
And financially, he was a complete mess.
I mean, he was constantly in hock to porn brokers, even when he made a certain amount of money or got some money from sucking up to the capitalists in his circle.
He did get some money, and I would say a good third of his output as a writer is desperate begging letters for money.
You know, he was borrowing at 20 or 30% because he just never got around to consolidating his finances and getting a lower 5% loan or something like that.
So, I mean, this is the great economist, right, who can't even figure out how to organize his own life and his own economics, and he's telling the whole world how to act.
It just seems to me a little odd.
The thing to wonder about, of course, is when the man was obviously such a flake and a horribly evil father based on the suicides of his children and a horribly hypocritical guy in that he talks about other people exploiting their workers and he's having sex with his maid and refusing to legitimate the child or to take care of the child.
This is not a well guy.
This is not a healthy guy. This is not a guy who you'd want to listen to about how to live, in my view.
Well, how come he did become so successful then?
Well, because the priest needed somewhere to go, my friends.
Oh, come on. The writing on the wall was pretty clear in the 19th century that the church, as it looked at the time, was not going to be the place for people to go to get money without having to work.
I mean, there is an enormous amount of second-rate, third-rate, fourth-rate, fifth-rate thinkers out there who think that they're all that and more and want to be paid a complete fortune for their wonderful, amazing thoughts, and the rise of the free market kind of threatened their income, right? Because beforehand, these people would just go into the clergy, and the clergy was a fine place to be, and just about anybody who applied could get in who had any kind of linguistic abilities.
And so all of these people who were swarming around the church and sucking up to the church and feeding off the parishioners' hard-earned money, these parasitical bastards, all needed some place to go.
And so where did they go?
Well, they couldn't continue to go to the church because the church was losing money, was becoming less respectable, was...
I mean, the fact that capitalism began to produce the kind of wealth and stability and benefits to society that it did put the church somewhat in disrepute, not to mention the hundred-odd years of religious wars, not to mention the separation of church and state.
Now, of course, once you get the separation of church and state, you don't get the money flowing into the church from the helpless, knife-at-the-throat taxpayers.
And so what else were they going to do?
I mean, work for a living?
Are you crazy? These people are hysterically vain, touchy, sensitive, emotionally violent, immature, brutal, abusive, alcoholic.
I mean, these are like the wreckages of society.
These are like... I mean, these are one step up from politicians and generals, people.
This is the refuse.
This is the detritus. This is the...
Flushed out, backwashed, sewed, effluent of society, these people.
And what do they want to do?
Well, they want to get paid for being their dysfunctional, evil, gnome-like little selves.
They don't want to go out there and actually put their vanities to test in the market.
Good God, no! I mean, how are you supposed to maintain a hysterically vain false self if you actually put yourself out there in the market and try and get paid for your efforts?
Ha ha! It's crazy.
I mean, I know that I put myself out there for 20 years trying to get paid as a writer and made precious little.
But I never for a moment imagined that anybody owed me money just for sitting around and writing.
My challenge was to keep plugging away and keep plugging away until I found a venue, either through nonfiction articles, through fiction, through plays, through poetry, through, as it turns out, podcasting.
And blogging, well, that's great.
Now I have an avenue, and that's great.
But it was my struggle, my challenge to find it.
It wasn't anybody else's requirement to subsidize me.
What a nightmare that would be.
So, I mean, this is why communism became so popular.
Because communism and socialism and the welfare statery and all that kind of stuff, I mean, government programs is where losers go.
And where people who have a certain look and a certain vocal styling and eloquence and so on, but who can't come up with anything that's actually useful to other people, that's where they go so that they don't have to confront their own uselessness.
I mean, honest, decent, mature, healthy people don't want to live off the stolen fruits of other people's honest labor.
And so they don't bully children into believing ridiculous things like heaven and hell and the soul and God and eternal judgment and hellfire and all this kind of evil crap.
I mean, they don't bully people and hold knives to their throats and then pretend to be all sanctimonious and wonderful and virtuous about it.
They don't live parasitically off capitalists and diddle their own maids and then say, hey, capitalists are the exploiters.
I mean, you don't talk about labor and the proletariat when you've never done a day's work of physical labor in your life.
I mean, healthy people don't do that kind of stuff.
It's hysterically vain, narcissistic, megalomaniacal, borderline, eek, weird, scary, horrifying personalities that want to be paid for nothing, right?
It's what Ayn Rand talks about as one of the core theses of...
Atlas Shrugged is that the root of all evil is the desire for the unearned.
So if you're somebody who really, you know, you're kind of delicate, you're a little sensitive, you maybe have a little bit of ill health, and you really don't get off on actually doing eight hours of work a day for somebody that finds value in what you're doing, and you exchange your work with, and you struggle up a career ladder, and you have all of the challenges and excitements, and you also, of course, in the business world or in a free market situation, you have to be mentored by someone.
I mean, the most valuable relationship I had was with my boss at this company who mentored me in a wonderful way around sales and how to talk about value with people.
And so you have to have the emotional maturity and security to deal with a subordinate position where you're being instructed.
In other words, you have to learn.
You have to have a God. You have to have a...
Sorry, that's a reference to my novel, The God of Atheists.
You have to have a higher value than your own vanity.
You can call it a God.
I mean, I particularly call it...
You know, rationality and logic.
And I'm sorry for confusing the issue in this area.
We can talk about this another time.
But when I say God, I simply mean you have to have a higher standard than your own vanity and your own desires in order to moderate your own personality.
And so the idea that Marxism was popular because it had some kind of innate value, truth value or whatever, I mean, it's nonsense.
People in the 60s are still white.
70s, 80s are still writing praise in terms of Marxism.
In the Good Night and Good Luck, Morrow says something like this about communists.
Have we, have never, have none of us ever had a friend who was a little different, have somebody who was just interested in advocating for change, and have none of us ever read a book that was considered dangerous?
I mean, this is a communist he's talking about.
Would you say, can you imagine substituting Nazism for this?
Can you imagine saying about, if your friend was Hitler, that you just, or some sort of Nazi, that you just had a friend who was interested in change?
Well, yeah, they're interested in change, like you're moving the heads of minorities.
So there is still this amazing sympathy for communism, and I talked about that in terms of the Judaic connection in the past, but basically you have to understand that communism just attracts those who used to become priests.
It's the same worldview.
It's the same, you know, orgy of revolution which produces utopia and, you know, there's so much that's in common between Marxism or socialism and Christianity in particular that it's ridiculous.
And Judaism as well. I don't know as much about Islam, but...
That human nature is corrupt and you need a big authority, a centralized authority to make sure everybody does the right thing and no property and sharing and everyone getting along and things being held in common and there is a...
Where there is God in the Christian sense, there is the state in communism.
And where there are high priests in the Christian sense or the Judaic sense, there are the inner party members.
Those who are lowest shall become high.
I mean, this inversal of values that's central to Old Testament and New Testament religions.
Well, I mean, that's just the circle in that the capitalists are brought down and the proletariat are brought to the top.
And the anti-conceptual bent within Christianity is very much the anti-capitalist or anti-profit-based or anti-conceptual bent within Christianity.
I mean, the parallels are just endless.
And, of course, that people can't determine their own lives but need to ask God and the priests how to live is what is the common thing in religion.
And in communism, lo and behold, you have people who are not allowed to choose for themselves, how they spend their days, but they have to apply to the party.
Who's going to tell them? I mean, it's all the old stuff that comes out of the Republic from Plato.
It's ridiculously common.
It's absolutely the same.
And of course, the main reason that communism didn't like Christianity or other kinds of religion was because it was far too obvious a competitor.
I mean, it was just too obvious that you didn't want your allegiance split between the two.
So you had to get rid of a competing religion.
Communism is essentially a religion in that it's impervious to proof.
It claims knowledge, but the events consistently prove the exact opposite, but it doesn't change anybody's mind that they talk about, well, communism has never been perfectly implemented, and that's where all the horror comes from, and so it's not the ideas, it's the people.
And you'll hear exactly the same thing from Christians who say, sorry, from communists, from Christians who say, well, it's not the church, it's the people in the church, and it's what we do with God's word, it's not God's word itself.
And so I would say people interpreted Marxism incorrectly, and I mean, it's just like you could go on and on, and I'm sure I'm going to bore everyone to tears if I keep going, but I mean, the number of things that Christianity and Judaism and communism, it's just that they're the same.
They're exactly the same.
Just one has this supernatural thing called class, and this other thing has a supernatural thing called God.
The tangible manifestation of class in the real world is the state in communism, and the tangible manifestation of God in the real world is the church in Christianity, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Anyway, I'm sure you get the idea.
So why is communism popular?
Well, communism is popular because a bunch of second-rate intellects don't want to work for a living.
And know that if they put themselves out in the free market, they're going to get squat.
They're going to get nothing. They're going to get bupkis, a big fat goose egg, zero.
Or very little. Very little.
So, if you're somebody who's interested in becoming...
I mean, this is why statism in academia and among intellectuals is so common.
Because they all want to get paid by the state.
I mean, they all want to get paid either as university professors or as lobbyists or as writers for people who want to back up political theories for political parties.
Or they want to write journalism for political party newspapers or newspapers or media that have a slant towards one of the other major political parties.
Talking about the U.S., of course.
In the bichromatic rainbow of political thought, that is, the American political party system.
I mean, this is an entire...
There's an entire mass of people who don't have anything of real value to offer the average Joe who's working for a living.
They don't have anything of value to offer him.
And so what are they going to do?
Are they going to pick up a wrench and start fixing cars?
Of course not.
We're talking about reedy, thin-voiced, prominent Adam's apple, thick-glasses kind of weedy intellectuals here.
And I know some of them don't look like that.
That's my mental image anyway.
We're not talking about robust people who have value to offer in general and therefore have value to offer in the realm of ideas.
We're talking about people who have got nothing to offer.
These are life's losers. These are the ultimate losers of mankind.
This is who goes into this.
This is who become intellectuals.
This is who become the politicians.
This is who become the people in the army.
I mean, these are the parasitical, scum-sucking, bottom-feeding, barnacle-encrusting-on-the-ship estate losers.
They're the parasites. And I would never call them losers because everybody's choice about how they spend their life is completely up to them.
I don't consider somebody who just wants to get high and stare at the fish in their parents' basement all day.
I don't consider that person a loser because they're doing what brings them pleasure.
Somebody who's a loser is somebody who flops and flops around saying that everybody else has to fund their own vanity, and if they don't, they're going to shoot them, and they never ever think of using violence.
Ha ha! I mean, that is a loser.
That is somebody who's just patently vile and ridiculous.
And so, you know, these people who are in the media and the people who are left-leaning or right-leaning, the people who are socialists and communists and fascists, I mean, these are just...
I mean, look at Hitler, right?
I mean, this is a guy who...
He couldn't get a job. He couldn't get accepted into it.
He was living on the streets. He was a bum.
I mean, this is what these people are like in a free market situation.
But then they get power, they get brutality, and they get all that kind of stuff.
So, obviously, communism picked up where Christianity left off.
Communism gave a home to all of these people who were really good at manipulating other people through language and really bad at actually working for a living and producing something that people would want to exchange something with them for.
And so, to me, the success of communism, it could have been anything.
It would have been something. But it had to be something that...
That gave these parasites, these losers, these vicious, vicious, evil bastards, a place to sort of roost.
They're like ticks.
They just sort of fasten onto your jugular and just keep sucking.
And so, as the church began to fall apart, they had to create all of this stuff which was attached to the state again, right?
Because the state wasn't paying the church anymore, and so there was far fewer jobs for priests, and these guys don't want to do an honest day's labor in their lives, and so...
They have to invent something else which the state is going to pay for.
So of course they start going as the church starts to fall.
They get a public education going so that they can jump from the sinking raft of the church and now they can go to public education and then they wanted to get into the bureaucracy so you get the progressive movement where they want to set up all these government bureaus.
And on the financial side, you get the creation of the Federal Reserve, which of course has nothing to do with the federal government.
It's just a private bank which has the monopoly on the printing of currency.
I mean, these people, they don't want to work for a living.
These are the sort of money men.
They're the money men. They're the bankers.
They're the banksters, as they're called, I think.
I mean, and I don't mean bankers like the people who loan you money and, you know, you buy your house.
I mean, I'm talking about the guys who control currency and the guys who got us off the gold standard.
I mean, that sort of filthy class of parasites.
I mean, these guys don't want to work for a living.
They don't want to be shadowy men behind the scenes and so on.
And so you've got to find a place for these people.
They've got to find some place.
Where they are going to be able to take their ease at other people's expense and they're not going to have to worry about their precious and feeble little vanity being punctured by other people actually asking them for a voluntary and cooperative relationship based on mutual value.
And you can always tell these people by their personal relationships.
I mean, this is where it always shows up.
You can always tell these... They're all sad, and they're all pathetic, and they're all old womanly.
I mean, this is an insult to old women, many of whom I'm sure are quite wonderful, but they're querulous, they're bitchy, they're snappy.
They write those mean little reviews about other people.
They're snarky. They talk in riddles.
They frame all the discussions.
All they know is how to manipulate in a sort of brutal and insensitive emotional manner.
They don't know anything about how to produce value for people all their whole lives.
They're parasitical based on vanity.
I mean, it's a horrible, ghastly, murderous existence.
And communism was where they went to, right?
And you can see the pattern pretty quickly, right?
Whenever something is threatened, right?
Whenever something really becomes threatened, then you just create a new thing.
And then these people all jump onto that new raft and begin feasting on all the inhabitants there.
So, I mean, you can see that the church starts to fall down.
So you get public education going, oh, let's all go over there and become teachers.
And then you get more people who want in on that.
So it's like, hey, let's create the Federal Reserve.
Let's do this. Let's do that.
Let's get the progressive movement going.
Let's get all these social programs going.
Fantastic. And then as the economy begins to go down in the 1930s, it's like, ooh, let's get more bureaucracies going.
Let's get all this other stuff going.
Let's create all of these agricultural programs and so on, which need to be administered.
Let's get all that. Ooh, wouldn't that be wonderful?
Fantastic. Ooh, there's a war.
Let's go do this. We'll become intellectuals.
We'll write propaganda. We'll run the war ministries.
We'll do all of this. Fantastic. Oh, it's done.
Okay, let's keep a standing army because we don't want to go back to the free market and actually have to prove our value to anyone.
And then as communism begins to fall out of favor, at least in some circles in the 1960s, it became pretty evident that the Cuban Missile Crisis and so on, being a communist, wasn't such a great thing.
And so it's like, ooh, okay, well, communism seems to be going...
Let's create the Great Society and let's all jump over onto that.
I mean, this is this constant rat scurrying from the ship that they're sinking, from sinking ship to sinking ship.
And now that you have the church and the state beginning to come back together again, well, they can leave some of these social programs and they can be a little bit less welfare-y.
So you get these right-wing Christian preachers and now they don't need to...
You get the basic idea that there's always some place for these bastards to go to And they're always creating some other sort of sick little plane of existence where they can sort of swarm to in order to avoid having to actually exchange value with someone and work for a living.
And this is the class of people.
I mean, for me, that's the class, if you want to talk about class.
Yes, I know these people probably had bad childhoods and this, that, and the other, and I'm sure that their parents are bitchy and mean and vicious and verbally abusive.
I mean, these are people who are verbally abused, not usually people in my view, at least not people who are physically abused, right?
If you're physically abused, you have kind of like tangible scars.
You have tangible things that happen to you which you can fight against.
I mean, there's almost like a clean robustness to being physically abused.
People who are verbally abused and whose parents withdraw, they become, I think, in my view, the parasitical class.
And, of course, those who are sexually abused become the criminals.
I mean, either of the high order kind in the military or the lower order kind in sort of the street thieves.
But, I mean, those are sort of the basic classes, right?
There's a couple of people who aren't abused.
The people who are physically abused, and usually it's not so bad.
The people who are emotionally abused become these sort of smarmy politicos, and they become these sort of horrible intellectual, verbal venom-spitting kind of creatures, and the people who are sexually abused become the criminals, right?
I mean, that seems to me pretty...
Pretty obvious, but I mean, I'm not saying that I'm not going to say for a moment that I have any proof for that.
That will come tomorrow. Let me just do a little research first.
Okay, you. Answer me this.
But, you know, this seems to me pretty clear.
I mean, communism was just that particular ship.
That all the rats swarmed to when the church was losing favor and losing money through the state, right?
I mean, these are the people who want stuff for free and want you to thank them for taking it, right?
So they want to steal your wallet and then they want to thank you, which is why they're always using the argument for morality, right?
I mean, the intellectuals and the priests, I mean, this is the class that uses the argument for morality.
I mean, the I mean, the grunt soldier is a little bit more honest, right?
They say, well, I'm here with the guy next to me, and it's all about loyalty to the guy next to me.
It's not necessarily a big moral thing.
It's just, I want to save the guy next to me, and I don't want to die.
I mean, instead of the grunt soldiers, everyone above them, and the politicians, and the bureaucrats, and so on there...
They're pretty much into the argument for morality, and so that's why these people use the argument for morality, because they want to steal from you, but they want you to thank them, because that's their vanity, right?
I mean, a simple thief is just going to steal from you, but he's not going to ask you to thank him for taking from you, but somebody who is a...
Somebody who is an intellectual, this kind of class of people, they're vanity.
They don't want to know that they're stealing because they're vain.
They don't want to see themselves that way.
And they want you to thank them so that they can feel that they're all that and more.
So it is a very sad existence and it's a sad class of people.
And these are the people who keep mankind enslaved for the most part, in my humble opinion.
So I hope that that delineation makes some sense to you.
Thank you so much for listening as always.
I look forward to your comments. Thanks so much.
And please, as always, don't forget to come and donate at www.freedomainradio.com.
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