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May 5, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:14:25
4080 Karl Marx: Past, Present and Future
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One of the most astounding aspects to life as a modern intellectual or free thinker is the degree to which Karl Marx is honored and venerated and Marxists openly ply their wares in universities and other places and in the media.
And it was kind of driven home to me.
I want to make the case.
Clearly, I guess I just haven't made the case clearly enough.
I oppose philosophically from the ground up and in every conceivable dimension All violations of the non-aggression principle.
The initiation of the use of force.
Self-defense is fine.
The initiation of the use of force is one of the greatest evils in the world.
And if you're looking for violations of the non-aggression principle, well, the first place you need to look is not private criminals, but governments.
Governments in the 20th century alone slaughtered 250 million of their own citizens, not including war.
Just slaughtering their own citizens.
That's a quarter of a billion people in just 100 years.
Now, communism killed about 100 million.
They can't really narrow it down too much.
It's a whole lot of bodies to leave in a rounding error, but about 100 million people killed in communism in the 20th century.
So... That is horrendous.
And so when I see the New York Times in its online blog section publishing an article, happy birthday, Karl Marx, you were right, then I just, again, I see this as astounding, and I want to step you through what that means.
This is very, very important stuff.
If you're thinking of going to college, you're in college, or you have people in your life who are thinking to go to college, you really need to listen to this.
This is one of the really important presentations.
I probably should have said that at the beginning.
This is one of the really important presentations that I want to get across.
Of course, I'll put all the sources below.
So, the article...
Written by a philosophy professor from Seoul, South Korea.
See, South Korea, right across the dividing line to North Korea, where we see the net effects of a communist dictatorship in the open-air prison camp of North Korea.
So, the article starts.
On May 5th, 1818, in the southern German town of Trier, in the picturesque wine-growing region of the Mossel Valley, Karl Marx was born.
At the time, Trier was one-tenth the size it is today, with a population of around 12,000.
According to one of Marxist recent biographers, Jürgen Neff, Trier is one of those towns where, quote, although everybody doesn't know everyone, many know a lot about many.
So... If we were talking about some recognized evil character in history, talking about the picturesque wine-growing region of the Mossel Valley, talking about how it's a small town where people know each other and they're friendly and so on, what this is designed to do, just so you understand propaganda 101, I'm not ascribing any motive to the writer, it's just how I see it, that this is priming you with a positive sense stimulation.
A wine-growing region, a small town, everybody knows each other.
I mean, this is like the opening to a cheer song, not the description of a heinous human being.
So the writer is trying to stimulate positive sense memories or positive sense ideas within you, and he wants you to ignore what Marx is fundamentally all about.
And I've got a whole presentation, The Truth About Karl Marx, which you can look at.
I'll link that below as well.
These are just a few things that you need to know about Karl Marx.
So here's Karl Marx.
Writing in an 1848 newspaper article, and I quote, There is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified, and concentrated. And that way is revolutionary terror.
Revolutionary terror.
Mandela didn't come out of nowhere, right?
Revolutionary terror.
Political terrorism is how you bring about communism.
And this, of course, is a lesson that has been fully absorbed by many elements of the left.
Revolutionary terror.
So he's a political terrorist advocating mass violence in order to bring about communism.
And that's, of course, how it generally comes about.
So, that's important.
Now, Marx's partner and the guy who subsidized him to a large degree, Engels, Wrote, it's hard to avoid thinking of this longingly, that he was thinking of this longingly in 1849.
He wrote, the next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth, not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples.
And that too is a step forward.
The disappearance from the face of the earth.
Entire reactionary peoples.
Well, what is he talking about?
What he's talking about?
Genocide. The next war.
Reactionary. Now, reactionary is those who oppose communism in general.
And so, yes, he considered this a step forward to wipe out entire groups of people.
Entire classes of people.
Entire dynasties. That is astonishing.
Now, given the hostility that communists have towards finance, towards capitalists and so on, it's hard to avoid the Jewish question with regard to how Marx was talking.
So when Engels, Marx's close collaborator and funder, talks about wiping out entire classes and groups of people as a step forward, and that their main enemy is those involved in finance and And usury and the ownership of the means of production and so on.
What is that relationship?
What is their relationship to the Jews?
Now Marx wrote an essay called On the Jewish Question.
It was originally published in 1844, and it contained the following statement.
What is the worldly religion of the Jew?
Huckstering, what is his worldly God?
Money, money is the jealous God of Israel, in face of which no other God may exist.
Money degrades all the gods of man and turns them into commodities.
The bill of exchange is the real God of the Jew.
His God is only an illusory bill of exchange.
The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant of the man of money in general.
Hmm.
He argues that, and I quote, in the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.
Well, that's obviously blatant anti-Semitism.
So he went to Ramsgate in 1879, and Marx wrote a letter to Engels that the resort contained, and I quote, many Jews and fleas.
In an earlier letter to Engels, Marx referred to someone as a Jewish N-word.
So this hatred of the money classes, this hatred of the capitalist classes, this hatred of money lenders and so on, what does that mean?
When Engels talks about wiping out entire groups of those opposed to communism from the world, what does he mean?
This lesson was not lost.
So Vladimir Lenin wrote in 1906, right?
So this is more than a decade before the revolution in Russia.
He wrote something called Lessons of the Moscow Uprising.
This was in August 1906.
And Lenin said...
We would be deceiving both ourselves and the people if we concealed from the masses the necessity of a desperate bloody war of extermination as the immediate task of the coming revolutionary action.
Now, Leon Trotsky, who was ice-picked to death by agents of Stalin while on the run from Stalin in the 1930s, I think his resting place was in Mexico.
So, Trotsky...
Wrote in Terror and Communism in 1920, he wrote this.
For us, we were never concerned with the Kantian priestly and vegetarian Quaker prattle about the sacredness of human life.
Lennon said, we do not promote any freedom or any democracy.
This is what is being talked about.
Political violence, political terrorism, extermination of entire groups of people, entire classes of people, mass extermination, genocide, and bodies piled halfway to the very sun.
This is what the theory is, and this is what the practice has been.
And people say, well, you see, but when Marxism turns out to be violent, it's not real Marxism!
No, it is. No, it is.
When the theory is bloody terror and mass extermination of anyone resistant to communism or identified as a class enemy or a reactionary or a neo-reactionary or a biped who you don't like, that is real Marxism.
That is the theory and that is the practice.
When people say we need bloody, violent political terrorism, followed by mass extermination, if that's the theory, how do you do that right?
How do you do that differently?
Now, the leftist socialist communist tradition of violence, and remember, national socialism, Nazism, national socialism.
The socialist tradition of violence, people kind of forget.
They fog out when you get Lenin and you get Stalin and you get Mao and you get the killing fields of Cambodia and you get North Korea and you get these endless violent episodes coming out of the left.
What do they say? I mean, the need for violence makes no sense even by the theory of Marxism.
Because Marxism, or Marx himself, believes that there's no such thing as human nature.
There's no such thing as a human essence.
We are like water that are poured into economic relations and class relations, and we gain our consciousness based upon our relationship to the means of production.
There's no human nature.
It's just soft goo that can be molded by environmental forces.
So he wrote, the human essence has no true reality.
Human essence has no true reality.
This is not unrelated to existence precedes essence, which is one of the hallmarks of existentialism.
So humans are like fog, they're like water, they're shaped by their environment, by their circumstances.
Marx wrote, it is not the consciousness of men that determines their lives, but on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.
So this, of course, makes no sense.
Why slaughter your enemies if people are infinitely malleable?
It makes no sense at all.
If people are infinitely malleable, then all you need to do is change their consciousness, change their way of thinking, change their minds, which are very malleable.
I mean, if you need to get a train track through a mountain, you can't go around, then you need to blast through the mountain.
But if there's no mountain, you don't need to blast anything, because the environment can be very easily changed.
Even by the theory. So, the writer saying, happy birthday, Karl Marx, you were right.
Went on to say in the article, such provincial constraints were no match for Marx's boundless intellectual enthusiasm.
Rare were the radical thinkers of the major European capitals of his day that he either failed to meet or would fail to break with on theoretical crowns, including his German contemporaries Wilhelm Weitling and Bruno Bauer, the French bourgeois socialist Pierre Joseph Proudhon, as Marx and Friedrich Engels would label him in their Communist Manifesto, and the Russian anarchist Michael Bukunin.
So, so far, of course, no arguments, no analysis, right?
Marx's boundless intellectual enthusiasm, yes, for boundless political violence and mass slaughter.
He's enthusiastic, I guess, you know, like a serial killer is enthusiastic to meet new people.
Now, communism, of course...
Evolved to some degree out of the challenges of the failures of religion and growing Darwinism.
And communism put itself forward as a scientific way of organizing society, scientific communism and so on.
And it actually did make predictions.
And those predictions failed to materialize.
Of course, it said it was going to outperform capitalist economies, which failed to materialize them.
Marx argued that you go from pre-feudalism and slavery to feudalism to capitalism to communism and it's just kind of inevitable.
It shouldn't need to be pushed along.
You shouldn't need to bathe the entire planet in blood to bring about your perfect society any more than you need to stretch your children to make them tall during puberty.
It's just going to happen of its own accord.
And so the fact that it never did really occur of its own accord, but always had to be ushered in.
Violence is the midwife of communism.
Brutality is how communism occurs, is brought into being, and that goes against the theory of communism.
Now, because Marx said that communism needs to go through the stage of capitalism, you can't go from feudalism to communism if you go through the stage of capitalism.
Then communism should have immediately and inevitably occurred in the most advanced economies, in the most capitalist economies.
But of course it didn't.
Where did communism get inflicted?
Well, in relatively...
Recently, post-serfdom Russia, in largely agrarian China, in largely agrarian Cambodia, and largely agrarian North Korea, and so on.
So, first of all, it's not supposed to be violent.
Secondly, it was supposed to occur in the most advanced economies.
None of that happened. Marx predicted...
See, there's the bourgeoisie, the owners of the means of production, and then there are the proletariat, the workers, right?
The boss and the workers. So Marxism predicts that the proletariat will swell.
There's going to be more and more proletariat, so they're going to increase as a percentage of the population, and as they increase as a percentage of the population, they're going to become poorer.
You understand? You understand? So that was one prediction.
More and more, poorer and poorer workers, proletariat.
Now that, of course, did not happen.
The number of laborers actually went down as more people got into the middle class, and the wages of those laborers went up, entirely the opposite of the prediction put forward by Marx and the Marxists as a whole.
Marx also predicted that as capitalist competition progressed, More and more and more and more people would be forced to sell their labor.
And so as you got more and more people pouring into the labor market, that's going to drive down wages.
Did not happen. The middle class, of course, was there.
It existed in Marx's day.
Now, his prediction was that the middle class was going to shrink as more and more people fell off the cliff down into the proletariat dungeon or hellhole.
The proportion of the middle class in society would decrease.
It would be a tiny, tiny percentage of the population.
Because for the Marxists as a whole, for a lot of the left, it's like a zero-sum game.
So if someone becomes rich, it's because other people have become poor.
It's tragic and it's wrong.
Of course, wealth is created in a free market environment.
It is not. Like, if somebody writes a song, they haven't stolen the song from everyone who didn't write it.
It doesn't make any sense.
I haven't stolen podcasts from other people in order to create this podcast.
I mean, a good singer hasn't stolen somebody else's voice in order to sing.
I mean, you understand. It doesn't make sense.
But in the zero-sum competition, Scarcity mentality as opposed to abundance mentality.
In the zero-sum competition framework of Marxism, so there's winners and there's losers.
And, of course, fewer and fewer people become winners, become rich capitalists, and then they own the means of production and nobody compete with them, and then more and more people fall, either from the rich or the middle class, into the squirming masses of the proletariat.
Well, the argument that the middle class is going to diminish was disproven by the fact that the middle class increased over the course of Marx's life and certainly past that.
Now, the other argument, the prediction, was that capitalists would also decrease As the proportion of the population.
Because it's not just zero-sum competition among the workers, it's zero-sum competition among the capitalists.
So there's going to be fewer and fewer and fewer and richer and richer and richer capitalists.
Well, that seems quite important.
But that's not what happened, of course.
Now, we can, of course, argue at the moment that, and there's good reasons to believe this, That the concentration of wealth is occurring at greater levels, at higher levels, in the modern economy, sort of post, probably post 1970s, when the gold standard was destroyed, and you got this free-floating, print what you want, type whatever you want into your own bank account kind of currency.
Yes, the rich have gotten richer, and the middle house has been hollowed out, but that's not the result of capitalism, because The governments have gotten bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and control over the economy by the government has gotten bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.
There's really strong arguments to say that If government regulation of business had simply remained in post-Second World War levels, then people would be far, far richer.
In America, right?
In America, there would be more than two, perhaps even three times richer, because that's been the drag of increasing government control over the economy.
So the concentration of wealth in the top right now is not a feature of capitalism, because capitalism has to be diminished and destroyed and undermined.
For the past hundred years, in particular since the creation of the Federal Reserve and central banking and so on.
Once the government controls the money, there's no such thing as the free market except as a remnant.
Because money is common, prior to cryptocurrencies, money is common to all economic transactions and whoever controls the money controls the economy.
And so The government's going to, of course, print their own money.
They can give it to their friends. Their friends can spend it.
And the friends get the full value of the money.
The inflation that results as a result from printing too much money hits the poor the hardest and so on.
So I just want to sort of point that out.
So what happened was the class of manual labors.
declined as a percentage of the population, and as they declined, they became wealthier and wealthier.
The middle class grew substantially, not just in terms of their proportion of the population as a whole, but in their wealth, and the upper class grew as well.
Now, Marxism, of course, is...
An answer to...
It's an ideological answer to a biological and economic question.
And ideology specifically rejects and refutes the basis of biology and the basis of economics and so on in general.
So I've talked about this before, but I mentioned here this is a good place to, you know, accordion, squeeze all of this stuff together.
So in any sort of creative endeavor where people are allowed full flow of their...
Creative faculties and opportunities, there's something called the Pareto distribution.
Now in the Pareto distribution of the people who are producing in a field where there's creativity, most people produce very, very little.
Most people produce very, very little.
Now, the Pareto distribution, and this shows up all over the place, the Pareto distribution basically states or reveals the law that it's the square root of the producers who produce half the value, right?
So if you have a company of 10,000 people, 100 people within that company are producing half the value.
And you can continue to slice this down, right?
So the square root of 100 becomes...
Who's producing that value?
A quarter of the value is produced by an even smaller proportion of that.
This is just a fact. You can think about this in terms of music.
You can think about this in terms of sports.
You can think about this in terms of podcasting.
You can think about this in terms of acting.
You can think about this in terms of writing.
You can think about this in terms of entrepreneurs, of creativity, of salespeople.
The basic reality is that it is a very small number of people who produce the vast majority of value.
And this is why, in a free market system, those people need to be rewarded so that they continue to produce value for everyone else.
That's how we get wealthier.
That's how we become wealthy.
And in communism, of course, those people are not rewarded.
As the old saying goes, they pretend to pay us, we pretend to work.
There is no benefit for producing the mind of Meltingly huge amount of effort that it takes to be that radically productive in the world.
So, the square root of the people produces half the value.
It's just a fact. It's just a fact.
I mean, as they say in sports and in arts and in music and so on, 95% of the money goes to 5% of the people.
Now, that's frustrating. I get that's really frustrating for other people.
I completely understand that.
And it would be delightful if we could magically change this.
I don't know if it would be delightful because, you know, when you start talking about magic, but we can't change it.
We can suppress it.
We can't change it.
And the freer we are, the more the Pareto principle tends to hold sway.
So you can't make everyone a great singer.
You can destroy the music industry and therefore nobody makes a lot of money from being a singer or a songwriter or whatever performer.
But you cannot make everyone a great singer.
You cannot make everyone a great songwriter.
You cannot make everyone a great podcaster or writer or baseball player or dancer or anything.
You can't do it. Now, there are, of course, bell curve implications with all of this, but the bell curve doesn't just mean around intelligence, right?
So the bell curve is most people cluster around the middle, a few people on the lower end, and a few people on the higher end.
The biggest predictors of success are the combination of IQ and the personality trait called conscientiousness.
You know, attention to detail, follow-through, planning, suppression of the desire to scroll through Twitter when you're supposed to be working on your book and all kinds of stuff, right?
So a concentration, focus, all that kind of stuff.
So there certainly is IQ considerations.
That the bell curve means that, you know, the very highest IQ people, and it's funny because I've sort of read arguments that if you are sort of middling high IQ, you know, sort of 115, 120, 125, maybe 130, you're a pretty good leader, you go higher than that, you can't really connect or concentrate or motivate people and you're just too smart to be a good leader, but...
In general, when it comes to producing value, just think of going to karaoke night.
We go to karaoke night, most people there are kind of middling, some people are just awful.
And some people just step up, open their mouth, and it's wonderful what they can do.
And that is the distribution.
In that case, it happens to be the distribution of the physical instrument, just happen to have a good singing voice, along with the specific motor control to hit the right notes, along with, we hope, perfect pitch and so on.
That is just the reality.
That is the burrito principle.
And that operates in the free market, and that is what allows us to progress, to increase in wealth and opportunity and so on, right?
I mean, all of the technology that allows me to talk like this and communicate with you and so on was invented by a very, very small number of people.
It was invented by a very small number of people, but we all get to benefit from it.
Now, in a communist system, they have no incentive to produce the kind of goods and wealth that they produce.
Therefore, you don't get them. Therefore, it's the same thing with farming.
That's interesting, right? Same thing with farming.
There are some people who are just great farmers.
Now, whether they're smarter, whether they're more experimental, whether they just work harder, in general, it's a combination of a whole bunch of things, but some people are great farmers.
Now, if you're a great farmer, you can bid more for land because you can get more out of the land.
I have a very nice camera here, and I'm willing to spend more on a camera than most people would because I can get more value out of the camera, I hope, by producing works like this than most people would.
You wouldn't be hoisting this thing around on a beach vacation.
So, in farming, you end up with...
Again, you've got 10,000 farmers, 100 farmers are producing half the output.
And so if you say, well, those farmers are stealing and they're evil and they're capitalists and they're bourgeois and they're exploiters and they're reactionaries and they're class enemies and...
Let's say you kill them. Let's say you throw them in a gulag.
Let's say you simply drive them off their land and leave them to wander the lanes.
Let's say you relocate them so that they can run a lathe or something like that in the city.
Well, what happens is then you redistribute the land that is being productively worked by the top people and your food production will collapse.
You have the same number of people farming the land But your food production will collapse.
I mean, if Katy Perry or Taylor Swift, if they're on tour, and then they say, well, you know, my voice is kind of tired, I'm just going to sub someone else in.
They're not replaceable, you understand.
They're not replaceable.
Well, I guess you got Freddie Mercury and...
So, I mean, Queen is still touring with a new singer, the guy from American Idol.
So, in general, though...
People are unreplaceable. If the singer can't show up that you want to see, the concert doesn't go on, right?
You get refunds.
They don't just say, well, we found some guy in the crowd who seems to be able to sing these songs.
They're not replaceable. It's the same thing.
Talent is not replaceable, which is why talent gets paid so much.
Brad Pritt, as an actor, is not replaceable by some extra.
Hey, we can pay a lot less to the extra and get the same amount of profit.
Well, you can't, because the extra won't be able to make people come and see the film or get free publicity because of that.
So this is really, really important to understand.
And if you look around in your life, you will see this burrito principle going on all the time.
And that is the answer.
It's a combination of Genetics and ambition and free will and concentration and you name it.
These are all things that drive economic growth, all things which are suppressed.
So imagine, take the music industry, right?
Take the music industry and you take the top 100 selling artists, you throw them all in gulags and you promote sound engineers to be the singer-songwriters.
What happens to the music industry?
It ceases to exist in any meaningful way.
I mean, you could prop it up.
You can prop it up like Japanese zombie banks, but it's dead.
It's going through the motions.
It's not real anymore.
So, this is really, really important to understand.
This is one of the reasons why communism and socialism and central planning and all, outside of just being evil and the initiation of the use of force...
Well, welcome to farming in South Africa going forward, right?
So, the article goes on, In 1837 Marx renaid on the legal career that his father himself, a lawyer, had mapped out for him and immersed himself instead in the speculative philosophy of GWF Hegel at the University of Berlin.
One might say that it was all downhill from there.
The deeply conservative Prussian government didn't take kindly to such revolutionary thinking.
Hegel's philosophy advocated a rational liberal state, and by the start of the next decade, Marx's chosen career path as a university professor had been blocked.
Article goes on to say, If ever there were a convincing case to be made for the dangers of philosophy, then surely it's Marx's discovery of Hegel, whose, quote, grotesque, craggy melody repelled him at first, but which soon had him dancing deliriously craggy melody repelled him at first, but which soon had him dancing deliriously through the streets of Berlin, as Marx confessed to his father in an equally delirious letter in November 1837, quote, I wanted to embrace every person standing on
this writer is...
I'm going to make a little bit of a case here.
It's going to be a little detailed again.
Sources will be below.
But, yeah. Hegel's philosophy advocated a rational, liberal state.
Hmm. What does that mean?
I wonder. Let's see if we can dig it in.
So... There was the British empirical movement, the John Locke stuff, and the Milton's defense of freedom of speech, and so on, rational arguments that led to the growth of the free market and open trade between countries, which hugely reduced European wars, particularly in the 19th century, because as the old saying goes, when trade stops flowing across borders, soldiers stop flowing across borders.
Trade is the antidote to war.
And there was a reaction to this kind of free market thinking, to this kind of individualism, and what was called the cult of reason, right?
As the saying says, bring before reason every idea, every opinion, every fantasy, and subject them to reason's interrogation.
So reason was growing as a result of British and other countries' focus on empiricism, on, in a sense, secularism, on Aristotelianism rather than Platonism.
And you can check out my presentation, The Truth About Aristotle, for more on this.
But there's always a blowback.
There's always a reaction, right?
So the reaction largely came out of Germany.
And you had Immanuel Kant's critique of pure reason, and you had Hegel.
Now, Hegel made arguments that closely followed Immanuel Kant.
So for Hegel, truth is like, it has three major characteristics.
What is truth? What is truth? It's a sort of foundational question of philosophy.
So for Hegel, truth had three characteristics.
It is infinite, it is absolute, and it is unified.
So metaphysically, which is like, where does truth come from?
Where does truth reside? So for Plato, there's this world of forms.
Why do you know what a table is?
Because before you were born, you were floating in this world of perfect forms.
You saw a perfect table outlined before you, and then when you were born, you had a vague memory of this perfect table, and then when you saw a table, it kind of reminded you of that a little bit.
I'm actually not characterizing this in a false way.
It's nuts, of course, right?
But there's reasons why people believe this, which we'll get into another time.
So, metaphysics is the nature of reality.
Is reality something higher?
Is it a simulation?
Is true reality, you know, God and heaven and hell?
Or is true reality the social good or the platonic world of forms or some collective concept?
Or is reality...
Sorry if you were sleeping. It's reality, you know, the bare bones matter and energy that we get transmitted to our brains through the senses.
So metaphysically, Hegel appeals to the absolute nature of a higher reality.
You always have to create this higher reality if you're a collectivist, because collectivism is a concept.
And so it doesn't show up in nature, right?
Very, very important. Concepts exist in the mind.
Things, as they are, exist in nature.
A number of people standing in a group, each individual stands in the group and has a measurable proximity to every other individual in the group.
The crowd, this concept of the crowd, that's in your mind.
That does not exist in reality.
So if you're going to say that concepts are more important than reality, that individuals should subject themselves to a collective, Either through something like democracy, or fascism, or communism, or socialism, or the common good, or whatever it is.
If you say the individual should subjugate himself to a concept, then there must be a realm wherein concepts are more important than individuals, and that is this higher realm.
It's called nirvana, the nuomenal realm.
It's called heaven, and sometimes it exists as the social good, or the common good, or the nation-state, or whatever it is.
The concept is not imperfectly derived from the instance.
Sorry about that language, it's important to be precise, right?
The concept must have a life of its own that is independent of each particular instance.
Like if I say I have five lizards and one of them is in fact an orangutan, I don't have five lizards, right?
Because, you know, the orangutan has hair, it's warm-blooded, it gives birth to live young and so on, and the lizards don't share those characteristics, right?
So, if my concepts are imperfectly derived from instances, from that which they describe, then I can never push the other way.
I can never say the concept is more important than the individuals, because the concept is derived from the individuals, and no No aspect of the concept can contradict the nature of that which it describes.
If I say I have five lizards and one of them is a mammal, I'm incorrect.
I could say, well, in some higher realm, this all makes sense, but that's just an appeal to irrationality.
It's an appeal to authority of this higher realm which can't be proved.
And so individualism rejects Higher reality.
Individualism rejects this, what's called, I call it a suprasensual realm, something which doesn't show up in the senses.
And there are exceptions, because something like Christianity, because the higher realm exists within the body as well, in the form of the soul, then there is more individualism within Christianity than other forms of thought exist.
So epistemologically, which is not just a study of, so metaphysics is a study of the nature of reality, epistemology is a study of how we determine truth.
So epistemologically, to Hegel, the concrete is derived from the abstract.
Truth is derived from falsehood.
Nature is derived from logic and spirit from nature.
So the concepts are the highest form of truth.
Each particular instance is not that important.
Now, in a rational philosophy, the reality is a statue and the concept is the shadow.
You've got this statue up there and then it's the shadow.
You'd never say that there can be things on the shadow that aren't in the statue.
If you've got the statue of a guy holding up a sword, you would never say, well, the shadow would have him holding up a tennis racket.
Or he would be some kind of blob rather than...
So you've got the light source, you've got the statue, and you've got the shadow.
And the shadow is derived from the statue.
If you want to change the shadow, you have to change the statue.
So as Hegel said, and I quote, all finite things involve an untruth.
So Hegel rejects objective reasoning derived from axioms like your average two-bit garden mystic.
So Hegel says, and I quote, A so-called fundamental proposition or first principle of philosophy, even if it is true, is nonetheless false just because and insofar as it is merely a fundamental proposition, merely a first principle, it is for that reason easily refuted.
Now, if that sounds like a philosopher attempting to destroy philosophy, well, I would kind of agree with you.
That seems to be the job of a lot of philosophers, right?
Now, one of the ways in which you can get this cognitive dissonance issue or the fact that you're in the realm of not an argument is so-called.
A so-called fundamental proposition, right?
So-called means I don't believe it, but I'm too lazy to disprove it, or I can't disprove it, and so on, right?
You know, if I said, you know, I don't know who's a...
Katy Perry, a so-called singer.
I mean, what I'd be saying is I don't think she's a good singer.
I don't think she's a singer. Like, so-called is not an argument.
So, when Hegel says, writes, a so-called fundamental proposition or first principle of philosophy, even if it is true, is nonetheless false.
Right? Just because and insofar as it is merely a fundamental proposition, merely a first principle, it is for that reason easily refuted.
I'm sorry, I mean, I know there's more.
You know, read the sources, right?
Spread yourself out.
Devolve and devour your Hegel if you want.
But, you know, I challenge you to find any works, any paragraph within my...
Books of philosophy that would get anywhere close to that level of WTF question mark hashtag brain-splosion.
Well, even if it's true, it means it's axiomatically false.
Creepy, creepy stuff.
So, the problem is, of course, that empiricism is necessary in the realm of the senses in order to survive.
You can have all this collectivist stuff that you want, but you need empiricism in the senses in order to survive.
Because you've got to go hunt, you've got to plant food, you've got to go to a job, you've got to cash your checks, you need empiricism just to be able to survive.
So Kant and Hegel both recognize the validity of empiricism in the realm of the senses.
Right? So they sort of carve two rounds, right?
You have to have two rounds. Otherwise, you don't even, you don't, you don't type, you don't write, you just dwell in the abstracts, like a ghost in the attic.
When I say attic, I mean the abstract concept of an attic, right?
So, both Hegel and Kant find this sort of mere sensual empiricism and the objective reason, which is derived from it, right?
Reality is objective and rational, and reason describes reality, and therefore reason must be objective and rational.
So, Kant and Hegel, they say, okay, yeah, there's the realm of the senses, but, you know, it's really not...
That's great. It's fine.
It's like a kind of crappy cottage rental.
You can do it if you have to, but it's not as nice as the mansion, right?
So empiricism, objective reason, are incompatible with these three infinite concepts.
Freedom, spirit, and God.
Knowledge of these concepts requires a rejection of sensual empiricism, right?
If you want to know God, you have to reject the senses.
If you want to know the platonic higher form, you have to reject the senses.
If you want to get to nirvana or new orminal realms, as Kant would put it, you have to reject the senses.
So Hegel writes, and I quote, Thus the knowledge of God, as of every super-sensible reality, Well, what does that mean?
To some degree, your guess is as good as mine, because this is more a denial of knowledge than the reality of knowledge.
It would be like a doctor saying, I'm never going to treat the body.
I'm going to talk to you about the concept, the perfect concept of ideal health that has nothing to do with your body.
Such a person would not only not be a doctor in any way that we would understand it, but it would also help in making you sick by having you concentrate on things other than medicine or exercise or diet or whatever would make you better.
So Hegel says, thus, the knowledge of God, as of every super-sensible reality, that means reality beyond the senses, is in its true character an exaltation above sensations or perceptions.
See, exaltation, another one of these positive words that just makes you feel good without giving you any knowledge content, like the wine-tasting region where Marx was born, where, I guess, rivers flow red just like they did after Marx.
So, this knowledge of God, he says, it consequently involves a negative attitude to the initial data of senses, and to that extent, implies mediation.
Right? So, you've got to reject the senses to get to the higher realm of truth.
So, Hegel's metaphysics, supersensual, suppersensual, way beyond the sense's higher reality.
His epistemology, how you get to knowledge, is that mystical concepts possess criteria which contradict the sensual characteristics of individual entities.
The danger of unconditional truth is quickly apparent, right?
So if there's this higher realm that you have to just kind of grok, you just kind of have to, you know, smoke this and you'll see it.
If there's this higher realm that contradicts the evidence of the senses, then how do you mediate disputes between individuals?
Scientists can mediate their disputes Regarding various conjectures or hypotheses, scientists can mediate their disputes according to reason and evidence, according to whether the theory is consistent within itself and whether it also conforms to the empirical evidence of what happens in the world, right? Whereas if there are these people who kind of poke their heads into another dimension, like interstellic gophers, and then absorb some incomprehensible truth that can't be communicated...
Well, this is where you get war.
This is where you get massive conflict.
This is why we have the society that we have, because people aren't agreeing to meet under the umbrella of reason and evidence.
And so it's all identity politics and class warfare and gender warfare and race warfare and mass...
I mean, it's the way it is.
When you give up on objective reality, you end up...
When you stop reaching for the truth, you end up reaching for the gun.
Because we all have to make decisions, individually and collectively, to some degree.
And if we're not willing to make those decisions according to objective reality, well, it's got to be forced, right?
Hegel goes on to say,"...what Spirit is, in essence, or according to its genuine meaning, cannot be revealed to what is devoid of Spirit.
On the contrary, for reception through the Spirit to be possible, the Receiver itself must be Spirit." I don't know.
It's like they don't make fortune cookies that big, but there's more truth, I think, in your average fortune cookie.
What spirit, he says, what spirit is in essence or according to its genuine meaning cannot be revealed to what is devoid of spirit.
Right? And you all know this cliche.
You probably do. If you have to ask, no explanation is possible.
If you already understand, no explanation is needed.
It's It's a terrible, bullcrap way of just dominating people.
So if you don't already understand this true science, which is like...
I want to say faith.
It's not like religious faith, but this belief in this higher reality which can't be communicated.
So if you don't already understand these forms, these higher ideals, these concepts, it can't be explained to you.
Individual judgment? Completely irrelevant.
So if you want to know something, you've got to already agree with what's being proposed.
Not really a cult, but again, it seems like one, I suppose.
The question of concept formation, like how do we have concepts?
How do we get concepts? It was actually my very first video I ever did.
Loved these many years ago.
So, when you have concept formation, how do we know what a table is?
Well, the Aristotelian, the objectivist, the empirical way is say, okay, well, you see a bunch of tables, you see their properties, you see the characteristics, you see what they're used for, and you slowly develop a concept of the table from repeated exposure to what a table is, right?
And that means that you can't ever have a concept of table that contradicts the sense data of a table.
You can't have a concept that is more powerful than the instance.
And this sounds very abstract, like who cares about tables, but this is very important.
When you subjugate the individual to the collective, it's because you're saying the concept, the collective, is more important than the individual, infinitely more important, in fact, and the concept must dominate the individual.
Now, the concept as a concept, the collective as a concept, has no voice.
You can go up to someone and ask how you're doing You can't go up to a concept called the crowd and ask how they're doing.
You could ask the crowd as a whole.
Every individual could answer.
But the crowd itself has no voice.
And so this is like peak hierarchical dominance 101, is you invent a concept that is not objective, that cannot speak for itself, but dominates individuals, and then you claim to be able to speak for that concept.
This can happen in the realm of religion.
This can happen in the realm of politics.
It can happen in the realm of Family honor can happen in the realm of families.
Create a concept that is infinitely superior, morally in particular, to the individual, and then claim that the concept speaks through you.
Only you represent the concept.
Only you represent the class consciousness.
Only you represent the deity.
Only you represent the democratic will of the majority.
Only you represent the common good.
Only you represent the class, the race, the gender, whatever.
And that way you don't have to prove to be right.
You don't have to go through the laborious process of coming up with arguments and learning philosophy, right?
You get magic wand of brutal power.
It's a very powerful Darwinian hook for gaining power over other human beings, right?
Which is one of the reasons why these ideas in particular arose post-Darwin.
So how do concepts get formed?
Well, the mystical, supersensual realm...
They always say the same thing.
It's just, there's this innate knowledge.
You either get it or you don't, man.
Like, you understand? He says, Hegel says, quote, Nature is rationally ordered.
It was made by a wise creator.
And wisdom is purpose, concept, free rationality itself.
Thus, spirit also knows that God is rational, absolute reason, absolute rational activity.
And it has this belief instinctively.
Again, I know it's a pile of polysyllabic goo, but, right, nature is rationally ordered, and it was made by a wise creator, and wisdom is purpose, concept, free rationality itself.
Now, I love how he uses the word thus here, like he's just proven something.
Word salad, thus, tax.
Give me your tax money.
Thus, spirit, he says, also knows that God is rational, absolute reason, absolute rational activity, and And it has this belief instinctively.
Okay, but if it's reason, you shouldn't need or have this belief instinctively, right?
Because it's reason. You should be able to reason it out.
I mean, if you were to say, the truth or falsehood of some particular mathematical theorem or scientific conjecture, you should just know it instinctively.
It's like, but then what's the point of science?
If you just know it instinctively, then why test anything?
There's no empirical test, right?
So that's, and when people start talking about absolute reason, perfect reason, I mean, they're taking things out of reality and putting them into this giant box of mysticism where they hope to club you into a kind of foggy submission.
Because you feel small relative to the concept.
I mean, how big do you feel relative to the common good of the country or the common good of mankind or the global society?
You feel small. And that's the whole point, is to make concepts way bigger than you.
Whereas you are the source of concepts, you're always bigger than concepts.
Concepts are nothing compared to you.
It's really, really important.
You, as the individual, are what reigns supreme.
The concepts, I know.
So there's all this instinctive knowledge.
But you have to believe in that particular deity to get it.
I mean, why you wouldn't have it as an atheist or a druid or some other religion and so on?
Well... Because in Hegel's scheme, individual consciousness has very little epistemological significance.
The individual has to reject the validity of his senses and the operation of his rational faculties to be able to approach truth.
Think I'm making it up?
And I quote from Hegel.
Quote, It is essentially spirit.
And spirit is essentially this, to be free, setting oneself over, against the natural, withdrawing oneself from immersion in nature, severing oneself from nature, and only reconciling oneself with nature for the first time through this severance and on the basis of it.
And not only with nature, but with one's own essence too, or with one's truth.
We make this truth objective to ourselves, set it over against us, sever ourselves from it, and through this severance we reconcile ourselves with it.
Sorry. I'm trying to do it straight.
This oneness brought by way of severance is the first spiritual or true oneness, that which comes forth out of reconciliation.
It is not the unity of nature.
The stone or the plant is immediately in this unity.
But in oneness, that is not a unity worthy of spirit, is not spiritual oneness.
Spiritual oneness comes out of severed being.
Is that clear? Do you now know what to do in your next moral crisis?
And this is the kind of double-think that you get.
And the whole purpose of coming up with all of this junk is to allow for double-think.
The table can be both table and not a table at the same time.
You can be an individual who's morally responsible but still must be subjugated to the will of the majority.
Right? So, in Hegel, separation is unity.
Subjectivity is objectivity.
Severance is oneness.
You've got to sever yourself from the knowledge that you have severed yourself and so on, right?
And of course, the whole point of this is making the highest value impossible to attain through either sense-based information or objective reason.
So Hegel, of course, has to undermine the value of individual perception and thought.
Faith or intuitive production, quote, is an inward act, an inner activity, not directed against something already to hand, the falling asleep of intelligence.
Ah, I see how that works.
It's, uh, well, works in a horrible, power-hungry kind of way, right?
Right? Faith, or intuitive production, quote, is an inward act, an inner activity, not directed against something all ready to hand, the falling asleep of intelligence.
See? Let go, Luke!
Let go! Just dream and focus and inward and right.
It's terrible, terrible stuff.
Anti-philosophy. Health is not the pursuit of particular actions designed to achieve and maintain health.
Health is not the recovery from ailments and so on.
Health is just meditating on perfect health that has nothing to do with the state of your body.
Thanks, Doc. I think I'll be moving on now.
Now, for Hegel, since the individual, through sense data and reason, can't get close to the truth, his assessment of the value of the individual follows, inevitably, the degradation of individualistic faculties.
And I quote,"...the particular individual is incomplete mind." A concrete shape in whose existence, taken as a whole, one determinate characteristic predominates, while others are found only in blurred outline.
In that mind which stands higher than another, the lowest concrete form of existence has sunk into an obscure moment.
So the individual is an incomplete manifestation of universal mind.
You're merely an obscure moment, don't you know?
Do you ever wake up this morning and say...
Brush my teeth, remind myself that I'm an obscure moment, and get on with my day.
Obscurely and momentarily.
So, with all of this, of course, we would expect Hegel to reject the belief that the individual possesses within his own mind, within his sense data, capacity within his reason.
Capacity for reason. The individual, we would expect Hegel to deny that the individual possesses the ability to determine...
True from false, good from evil, on his own cognizance, right?
Now, John Locke argues that the individual possesses this ability, but of course, as I talked about the blowback, Hegel responding to this idea that the individual, that you, that I, possess the ability to determine truth from falsehood, good from evil, right from wrong.
Hegel writes that, and I quote, According to a view of this kind, the world of ethics should be given over as, in fact, of course it is not, to the subjective accident of opinion and caprice.
Ah, you see? The truth is there's some higher realm, higher reality, absolute, that you can't ever explain to others.
And so, the individual is always wrong compared to this imaginary other massive superseding concept.
And so... The individual can't determine the truth, right?
That is very, very important.
And that's how you end up subjugating yourself to the collective.
He writes, according to a view of this kind, the world of ethics should be given over, as in fact, of course, it is not, to the subjective accident of opinion and caprice.
And this is still going on today.
Reality is subjective.
Good and evil is subjective.
Right and wrong is cultural and so on.
Hegel also writes, quote, of course, it is easy to recognize that evil, ignorance, passion, selfish inclination, private pursuits, And the will that wishes to determine itself for itself obscure the moment of insight into truth as the knowing and willing of the good.
Not much of a syllogism there.
So, you've got this remedy.
Unity is one of the three components of truth for Hegel.
The criterion of absolute unity also demolishes any ethical criteria based on individual self-interest, right?
So, you don't matter. You can't determine the truth and falsehood.
Therefore, everything that's based upon your self-interest is mere selfishness.
This is where the pathological altruism comes from.
So this demand for absolute unity, you always know when you're wandering into bullcrap land, when you start to see these caps, absolute unity.
The caps is like, I'm going to put a cap in your philosophy.
And he writes this, as the substance, being an intelligent substance particularizes itself abstractly under many persons, the family is only a single person, into families or individuals who exist independent and free as private persons, it loses its ethical character.
For those persons as such have in their consciousness and as their aim, not the absolute unity, but their own petty selves and particular interests, right?
Boom!
Shut up and obey the collective, which only I can speak for, or only the king can speak for, or only the commissar can, or the ruler of the communist country can speak for.
Thank you.
So, since absolute unity is the highest good, it's impossible for the individual to be moral, unless he or she participates in absolute unity, which means subjugation to the will of the collective or the ruler.
You then might ask, okay, so if I'm supposed to subjugate myself to this absolute unity, how do I know if I'm doing it or not?
Can a brother get a reason or two?
Well, those reasons can't be objective, they can't be empirical, and they can't be rational.
Right? Because absolute unity is not sense-databased, it's not empirical, it's not objective, and it's not rational.
So, no empirical evidence can tell you, no reasoned argument can tell you whether you are successfully subjugating yourself to absolute unity.
Because the senses deal with individual entities, which are of lesser value than this giant concept of universal good.
So, again, just like Kant-Hegel appeals to collectivism, right?
As the defining criterion for absolute unity.
Now, collectivism, fundamentally, it's not the will of the majority.
For error multiplied does not equal truth, right?
Because if each individual...
is wrong, then a group of individuals can't be right.
If no individual can get to truth, virtue, goodness, and certainty, then no group can either.
Collectivism, as it always turns out, is the will of the state, the will of the secular rulers.
And remember, philosophers that you've heard of have all been, prior to very recently, have all been approved of by secular rulers.
Otherwise, they were put in prison, they were driven out, their writings were burned, and so on.
If you haven't served the ruler, you don't end up, usually, in the history of philosophy classes.
So, again, according to Hegel, all individuals are the subject to the will of the state.
And I quote, furthermore, for the paternal soil and the external inorganic resources of nature, from which the individual formally derived his livelihood, the state substitutes its own soil and subjects the permanent existence of even the state substitutes its own soil and subjects the permanent existence of even the entire family to dependence to itself
Thus, the individual becomes a son of civil society, which has as many claims upon him as he has rights against it.
Hmm.
Again, none of these are arguments, but they're an inevitable consequence of this worship of anti-rational concepts.
Right?
He writes, thus the individual becomes a son of civil society which has as many claims upon him as he has rights against it.
So, sounds like the individual at least has rights against the state.
But, this is just a bait and switch.
It's a sales pitch. These rights that the individual has against the state, they're not real.
Not real. It's the same thing with Kant as it is for Hegel.
Because fundamentally, they placed no limits upon the will of the enlightened despot.
Of course, how could they?
The philosopher king, like the tyranny advocated by Plato after he saw his beloved mentor Socrates put to death by the Will of the Athenian mob, he turned to dictatorship as the ideal political system because a true free system could probably not have been advocated back then as it's risky to do now.
But how can you put limits on the will of the ruler who is a manifestation of absolute perfect divine will because that would be to say that the individual has some right against the concept.
The whole point of collectivism is that the concept rules completely over the individual.
I can contradict the properties of the individual, right?
Because if it's just one person, like if it's just one person saying, I'm in charge, I get to use violence against you, I get to tax you, I get to rule you, I get to control you, I get to sell off your children as debt slaves, people would say, well, wait a minute, you're claiming a universal right, but it only applies to you, right?
And this is my book, Universally Preferable Behavior, A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics, designed to solve this whole problem.
And so, why does the ruler get all of this power when the average citizen does not?
Well, you have to create this higher realm, this perfect realm, and you have to have this whole cadre of intellectuals and theologians and so on surrounding the ruler to give him legitimacy and extract him from the general category of humanity.
Hegel writes,"...in the government regarded as organic totality, the sovereign power..." Principate is a subjectivity as the infinite self-unity of the notion in its development.
The all-sustaining, all-decreeing will of the state, its highest and all-pervasive unity, in the perfect form of the state in which each and every element of the notion has reached free existence, this subjectivity is not a so-called moral person or decree issuing from a majority, forms in which the unity of the decreeing will has not an actual existence, but an actual individual, the will of a decreeing individual, monarchy.
The monarchical constitution is therefore the constitution of developed reason.
All other constitutions belong to the lower grades of the development and realization of reason.
That's some pretty powerful stuff, wouldn't you say?
And again, this follows.
The government is regarded as organic totality.
The sovereign power is subjectivity as the infinite self-unity of the notion in its development.
The all-sustaining, all-decreeing will of the state, its highest and all-pervasive unity.
So you have to have unity to the concept.
The state represents the concept, and therefore unity with the concept.
It's subjection to the state.
And that's powerful stuff.
And there's a reason why Marx loved this guy.
There's a reason why Marx loved this guy.
So, if you understand this whole idea, the relationship then in Hegelianism between the individual and the state is inevitable.
And I quote, boom!
Money shot, baby. Blood-soaked syllables, unrolling through history.
Hegel wrote, sacrifice on behalf of the individuality of the state is the substantial tie between the state and all its members, and so is a universal duty.
Sacrifice on behalf of the individuality of the state is a substantial tie between the state and all its members and so is a universal duty.
Sacrifice to the state.
Sacrifice to the state. And this is the thinker that the writer of the New York Times article says wants to create just some liberal world.
Now, This world spirit, a very, very quick run through.
So Hegel said that there was this world spirit that determined truth and everybody must subjugate themselves too.
And he said that that world spirit would sometimes pick nations to manifest itself and that gave those nations the right to dominate others.
So just as the individual must be dominated by the state, countries must be dominated to the particular state Or race.
That the world spirit manifested itself in that particular moment in history.
There's a world spirit that gives you the right to conquer everyone else in the known universe.
In fact, you must. In fact, if you don't, you're evil.
That's a great thing to tell to the Germans, right?
Good job, Higgy.
Ah, yeah. We'll get into Nietzsche's relationship to all of this another time.
It's tempting! I'm trying to stay on target.
So Hegel, to a large degree, with a few hops, skips and jumps, Hegel led to Nazism, to the subjugation of the individual, to the despotic will of the ruler, and through that, the subjugation of other countries.
So Hegel led to Nazism.
Marx led to Communism.
Because Christianity stood in the way of the expansion of the state.
Because Christianity for salvation requires that people have free will.
You must choose your moral actions in order to be either condemned as evil or rewarded as good.
And so all that interferes with the free exercise of free will.
is a massive impediment to the unrolling of your spiritual destiny as the result of free will.
This is one of the reasons why free markets developed in European or European-derived Christian countries.
It's one of the reasons why, notwithstanding my earlier statements on this many years ago, Christianity has fought against slavery.
Because The slaves are made in the image of God, and the slaves must have freedom in order to be judged.
Now, communism looks at Christianity and says, well, that focus on individualism, that requirement of freedom is in our way, because we wish to tear out God from the universe and replace it with the state, which Hitler also was working on, that there was going to be this Nazi church and so on, right?
So Hegel leads to Nazism.
It's somewhat of a simplification.
I could make the case. Maybe I will.
Let me know if you want me to.
I've done it before. So Hegel leads to Nazism.
Marx leads to communism. Nazism retains vestiges of God, but substitutes the ruler, as Hegel requires, whereas communism scrapes away God and replaces God with the state.
So the article continues.
As we reach the bicentennial of Marx's birth, what lessons might we draw from his dangerous and delirious philosophical legacy?
What precisely is Marx's lasting contribution?
Now, you may want to talk about the hundred million dead, the endless gulags, the torturers, the rapes, the murderers, the wars, the subjugations.
You may, but you won't.
Of course, right? Today the legacy, says the writer, would appear to be alive and well since the turn of the millennium.
Countless books have appeared from scholarly works to popular biographies broadly endorsing Marxist reading of capitalism and its enduring relevance to our neoliberal age.
See? No arguments yet, right?
In 2002, the French philosopher Alain Badeau declared at a conference I attended in London that Marx had become the philosopher of the middle class.
What did he mean? I believe he meant that educated liberal opinion is today more or less unanimous in its agreement that Marxist basic thesis, that capitalism is driven by a deeply divisive class struggle in which the ruling class minority appropriates the surplus labor of the working class majority as profit, is correct.
Marxism 101.
You work for a lawn mowing company and you go and charge somebody 50 bucks to mow their lawn, right?
Amen.
And you use the lawnmower and the marketing and the website and the advertising and the experience and so on and the reputation of the lawnmower company, right?
And so you make 50 bucks, they keep 25, and you get 25.
Now for the Marxists, you should get 50.
Generally, right?
So you have to produce more value than you consume in order for the economic transaction to occur, right?
So if they said, well, we can charge 50 bucks to mow someone's lawn, and you said, well, I want all 50 of those dollars, then the lawnmower company would say, well, no, because we had to build the company, we had to build the business, to create the reputation, create the website, we had to buy the physical equipment, we had to get the loans, we have to have an office, we have we had to buy the physical equipment, we had to get the loans, we have to have an office, we have to have a receptionist, we have to have phones, we have to We have to do quality control.
We have to hire people. We have to fire people.
We have to, I mean, Marx never ran a business.
Try to be an entrepreneur, right?
So, you know, white people can't talk about the black experience, but Marx, who never worked a day in his life, can talk all about what it's like to run a business.
Naturally, of course.
So if you say, well, give me all 50 bucks, I'll take your lawnmower, I'll take your business reputation, I'll take your contacts, I'll show up, I'll mow the lawn, I'll keep, then they'll say no.
So the only way you're going to get to mow the lawn using somebody else's equipment is if you're willing to give them some proportion of the money that's made, right?
Otherwise it's not going to happen. So for Marxists, the fact that you don't get paid 50 bucks when someone's willing to pay 50 bucks to get the lawnmower is theft, right?
Now, it's not, of course, and I just went over why, because there's been a huge amount of time, energy, and investment in creating the business, which you are then profiting from.
If you think it's so easy to get 50 bucks to go mow someone's lawn, then why on earth would you bother Getting somebody's lawn mowing equipment and so on and doing it that way.
You just go do it yourself, right?
But then you find out if you want to go and get someone's lawn mown for 50 bucks that you have to go buy some big lawn making equipment and then you have to spend a lot of time phoning and then you have to do the corporate taxes and you have to do the health insurance and you have to do whatever.
You've got occupational health and safety concerns and there's a huge amount of excess labor.
So you pay someone 25 bucks to borrow their lawn mowing equipment and to borrow their marketing, their website and write...
So, you understand, right?
I mean, this is not that complicated.
And the fact that it is complicated just tells me how few people have actually even remotely tried to run a business.
I mean, even from a lemonade stand and output, right?
I mean, I remember this when I was a kid.
When I was a kid, I remember reading that it cost like, I don't know, three cents of ingredients to make a can of Coke.
And I remember saying that.
I was in Canada, so I think I was about 11.
And one of my friends said to me, well, yeah, but then there's the cost of the factory, there's the cost of advertising, there's the cost of taxes, right?
Gotta have a big vault, a secret formula, battery acid and copper cleaner and bye-bye stomach bacteria.
But that was an important moment for me.
And it's just little things that you put out to people, right?
So, that's what he's saying about all of this, right?
That's what he's saying, that this is basically correct, right?
That this excess labor issue, you know, this deeply divisive class struggle.
Well, yeah, the bosses want to pay the workers less, and the workers want to make more.
So? Why is it only the boss's greed that's ever talked about?
And to be honest, the boss does not want to pay people less.
I've been a boss. I've interviewed like a thousand people.
I've hired I don't know how many people.
I've managed. I've grown.
I've done the sales, marketing.
I've done just about every aspect of a business.
And I've been doing this, which is a business for 11 years, freedomainradio.com slash donate.
And so you don't want to pay people less because they're going to be unhappy.
And also, especially for businesses that require intelligence or work that requires intelligence, you don't want to pay people less.
Because if somebody's worth $50,000 a year and you offer them $30,000 a year and they take it, it's not going to work for long.
Either they're so dumb that they can't figure out what they're worth, in which case that's kind of a mark of, hmm, haven't you done any research or talked to some friends?
What's the matter with you, right? Or you pay them too little, at which point, at some point, they're going to find out they're worth more and they're going to get mad at you.
And they're going to come storming into your office, they're going to quit, they're going to yell at you, they're going to be mad, like...
And therefore, if they quit, then all the time you spent training them is wasted.
So you don't, if you've got half a brain, you don't want to just sit there and play, well, I want to pay everyone a dollar a year.
But of course, you would rather pay people less.
And people would rather make more.
That's the human condition.
That's why we negotiate, right? We always want more.
Basis of economics, right?
The three rules, right? Number one, human beings respond to incentives.
That's the burrito principle, right?
Number two, all human desires are infinite.
And number three, all resources are finite.
You need allocations, and there's no better allocation than the price system in the free market.
No better allocation. In fact, there's nothing that even comes close.
There's no substitute. For supply and demand and the price mechanism of where resources should go, right?
If a whole bunch of people need their roofs rebuilt because there was a giant storm, they're going to bid up the price of labor.
And that's why you're going to... So you're going to send stuff there until the price goes.
There's no substitute for it.
Just read your mises. There's no substitute for price.
So here, the ruling class minority, according to this article, appropriates the surplus labor of the working class majority as profit.
Even liberal economists such as Nouriel Roubini agree that Marx's conviction that capitalism has an inbuilt tendency to destroy itself remains as prescient as ever.
Hmm. I don't know.
No definition of capitalism and no definition of communism here, right?
It's all just a bunch of adjectives and a bunch of oopy-goopy-doopy stuff.
This guy said so-and-so.
This guy made a statement.
What does he mean? Well, I think he means this.
It's like... That's theology.
That's not philosophy. How about so-and-so made an argument, here's the reason and evidence behind it, and here's where it falls short, or here's where it can be buttressed, or here's where it's correct.
No definition of anything.
And people say, well, capitalism is falling apart right now.
No, it's not. No, it's not.
No. It's like you have some giant tumor that's killing you.
And people say, well, the healthy body is just dying.
It's like, no, no, no, there's a tumor.
And the tumor here is coercive interference in free trade.
Coercive interference in free trade.
Licenses, fiat currency, taxes, regulations, you name it.
Coercive interference in free trade.
And, I don't know, the lack of self-knowledge for these kinds of guys, it really is quite astounding.
This guy's getting paid, right?
I mean, somebody posted a link to this guy's article.
It was pretty funny. I think it was this guy's article.
It was an article about Marx's birthday.
Hey, yay Marx! Marx is wonderful.
Capitalism is evil. And they clicked on it, and it was like, you've reached the limit of your free articles.
Now you have to pay for them. It's like, wait, I have to pay in a relatively free market to get access to the article that says free markets are evil and everything should be communist.
Why aren't you giving it away for free?
Why are you taking my excess money...
Which, the money that you take from me on the website has to be more than it runs to the website.
So, lack of self-knowledge.
This guy's, I think he's an associate professor of philosophy, right?
So, he's being paid...
By a university.
And the university is going to have a lot of government funding.
It's going to have some private funding, but there's going to be a lot of government-supported loans of the people who go and get taught by this guy and so on.
Who's paying your salary?
You know, most professors work like 15 hours a week.
They get wonderful conferences in exotic locations.
They get sabbaticals. They get months and months and months off in the summer.
I mean, it's a very, very sweet gig.
And it's maintained by...
The power of the state to reinforce who can grant diplomas and doctorates and other kinds of degrees.
And it's maintained through the state enforcement of contracts around tenure and the state maintenance of particular unions and so on.
So who's paying this guy's salary?
It's the working class.
He's not producing value in the free market in the same way that the proletariat are.
This guy, he's in the middle class.
He's a bourgeois. And his income is being supported by state power and is being supported by the wages of the working class.
If you're looking for somebody parasiting off the working class, may I introduce you to a little friend called a mirror!
But this is where the unanimity abruptly ends.
While most are in agreement about Marx's diagnosis of capitalism, opinion on how to treat its disorder is thoroughly divided.
And this is where Marx's originality and profound importance as a philosopher lies.
He's just made a bunch of statements.
Goes on to say, first, let's be clear, Marx arrives at no magic formula for exiting the enormous social and economic contradictions that global capitalism entails.
According to Oxfam, 82% of the global wealth generated in 2017 went to the world's richest 1%.
See, this is where, I don't know if this guy's read a lot of Marx.
I mean, I'm sure he has.
But, yeah.
Marx arrives at no magic formula for exiting the enormous social and economic contradictions that global capitalism entails.
Yeah, he does. Remember that little bit about political terrorism, rivers of blood, and with Engels, the genocide of entire opposing groups of people?
Yeah, he's got a magic solution.
It's just stone evil because it's a massive violation of the non-aggression principle and of basic property rights.
So yeah, he's got a magic solution.
It's called slaughter everyone who disagrees with you and use massive amounts of terrorism to bring the new system into being.
Violence is the midwife of communism.
So it kind of does.
It's just people don't really want to talk about it.
Economic contradictions that global capitalism entails?
Global capitalism? Good lord!
Are markets more free or less free now than they were in the past?
Well, governments keep growing, debt keeps growing.
We have a system now where every single man, woman, child in the world is $30,000 in debt.
In other words, we've converted debt to human life.
Debt is unsustainable, and when it comes crashing down, a lot of those human lives are going to be unsustainable as well.
How is that capitalism?
How is that even remotely capitalism?
You've got central planning, central banking, you've got government control of currency, you've got government control of education, both lower and higher.
You've got military-industrial complex, which is not driven by the free market.
You have massive amounts of regulations and controls.
How is this capitalism?
82% of the global wealth generated in 2017 went to the world's richest 1%.
This is the way you always see it phrased.
This is the way you always see it phrased, right?
All this wealth just goes to the world's richest 1%.
Now, let's pretend that this occurred in a free market.
Right? 82% of the global wealth generated went.
So what you do is you separate...
The people who are creating from the wealth, and then you say, well, the wealth just ended up there like it's magic, right?
I mean, if you say, 82% of the money earned by songwriters went to the best 1% of songwriters.
82% of the money earned from songwriting went to the best 1% of songwriters.
Does that seem a little more fair?
Does that seem, well, that's just the way it is?
But they always say the wealth is distributed here or the wealth ends up here.
Like the wealth is created separate from those who are generating wealth, from those who are doing work and adding value.
And then there's this weird transition, right?
Like if you go and you make a business and you make money and customers pay you and so on, then you get paid, right?
You pay yourself in shares or you pay yourself in equity or you pay yourself in salary or whatever, right?
Who are you stealing from? Who are you stealing from?
Instead of using a hand mower to mow people's lawns, you buy an electric mower.
Well, you have to invest in that, and then you can mow more lawns, and you can make more money, which pays off buying the electric mower or the sit-down mower or whatever.
Who are you stealing from? I've just created...
I mean, I'm spending a long time. I appreciate everyone's attention to this.
I spend a lot of time.
This is like I started studying philosophy and economics when I was 16 years old, 35 years later.
This doesn't come out of nowhere.
How can you... How can you just do these speeches for so long?
It's like, you know, if I've been working on something for 35 years and I can't do it well, well, I've just kind of wasted 35 years, haven't I? Now, this wasn't all studying.
I mean, I'm pretty well educated in this stuff.
I've read a huge amount about it, interviewed a whole bunch of experts on this show.
But also, I've been in business.
I've run entire core areas of a software business.
I co-founded a company, grew the company, ran the research and department.
Sorry, ran the entire technical department of a software company.
And so, yeah, you kind of get some experience of these kinds of things.
So how is that a contradiction?
Right, if I say, let me put it to you this way.
If I say, 100% of the lottery winnings went to people who won the lottery.
Is that wrong?
Is that bad?
100% of the winnings Of professional poker players went to professional poker players, right?
If I say 50% of the winnings of professional poker players went to the best poker players, is that wrong?
Is that bad? Doesn't make any sense.
Doesn't make any sense.
Better waiters get tipped more.
Incompetent, rude waiters get tipped less.
Is that wrong? Is that...
How is that... If I say 100% of lottery winnings went to people who play the lottery or who won the lottery, how is that a contradiction in the lottery system?
That is the lottery system. That's kind of how it works.
100% of the payouts for insurance went to people who previously bought insurance.
That's a big contradiction in insurance.
It's kind of... Goes on to say, what Marx did achieve, however, through his self-styled materialist thought were the critical weapons for undermining capitalism's ideological claim to be the only game in town.
See, again, any definitions of capitalism?
People just say buying and selling.
That's not capitalism. That's not capitalism.
Buying and selling is not capitalism.
That's like saying all sexual activity is consensual.
No! See, there's consensual sexual activity and then there's non-consensual sexual activity, sexual assault, inappropriate touching and rape and so on.
So there are voluntary economic transactions and there are involuntary economic transactions.
There are voluntary transactions such as you need gas, you go fill up your gas.
There are involuntary transactions insofar as zoning and controls and taxes and regulations and so on that drive up the price of gas enormously.
There are involuntary economic transactions like you're forced to pay for government schools whether you agree with the content of the lessons or even have children.
You are forced to run into debt to fund multiculturalism, even though you may not agree with it.
So, he goes on to say, In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote, and I quote, The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe.
It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science into its paid wage laborers.
No, see, capitalism simply says you can't initiate the use of force and your property rights should be respected.
That's all it says. It's not a system.
It's the absence of a system.
It's not a system. It's the absence of a system.
It says, do not initiate force.
Well, I guess, you know, you can say three, but the two of them say the same thing.
Keep your contracts, don't initiate force, respect property.
Which is the basis of civil law, of criminal law, right?
Don't steal. Don't rape.
Don't murder. And don't assault.
And respect property. And if you sign a contract, keep your word.
Be honest. Don't use violence.
Respect property. Everything we ask from your average kindergarten student.
Don't use violence.
Don't take other people's stuff.
Don't lie. That's all it comes down to.
It's not a system.
It's a couple of basic moral rules that only sociopaths have any issues with.
I'm just pointing that out in essence.
It's not a system. It's not a system.
If there was some central government agency that funded songwriters and funnel songwriters and did this and said what you could write and what notes you could use, that would be a system.
If you got rid of all of that and said, yeah, you can make music however you want.
Just keep your word, don't steal, don't use violence.
Is there now a system?
If there's a system wherein the government assigns you to someone who you marry, they force you to get married to someone, right?
Here's your partner, you've got to marry them, you've got to live with them.
Well, that's a system. If then that system is abolished and people say, yeah, you can date and you can marry whoever you want.
Is that a new system? No.
No, it's freedom. Freedom is not a system.
Freedom is not a system.
And it's so weird.
It is a theology, right?
When I say replacing God with the state, I'm not kidding.
Marx is the prophet. Because what happens is this guy quotes Marx and thinks he's made an argument.
Thinks he's proven something.
Well, it's written in the Communist Manifesto!
Like it's written in these holy texts.
Only a blasphemer, only a bourgeois class enemy exploiter, right, would question these holy statements written down.
I mean, it's so weird.
I mean, it's fundamentally weird on so many different levels.
But this quote from the Communist Manifesto, and he says, well, physicians and lawyers and priests and poets and scientists, well, now they get paid.
Right? Now they can trade their labor on the free market and figure out how much value they have.
By the way, Marx tried to get a job, I think at a railway station, but his handwriting was too ridiculously bad.
He never got a job. Never got a job.
Lived off Engels who ran, who had inherited, I think, a factory.
Marx lived off the very profits he decried as evil.
Damn, those vampires are evil.
Here, give me your neck. Crazy.
Yeah, like before the free market, nobody got paid, nobody had money, nobody exchanged anything.
The article goes on to say, Marx was convinced that capitalism would soon make relics of them.
The inroads that artificial intelligence is currently making into medical diagnosis and surgery, for instance, bears out the argument in the manifesto that technology would greatly accelerate the division of labor or the de-skilling of such professions.
So this is a... A kind of canard that is continually...
I took the course in university, the rise of capitalism and the socialist response.
So here's the basic idea.
When you...
When you made something from scratch yourself, when you built a house yourself from scratch, and you did the plumbing, and you did the water tank, and you did the roof, and you built everything yourself, and maybe you built the furniture too, and so on.
Well, it took forever.
And it didn't just take forever to make that house.
It took forever for you to learn all the different disciplines.
That you needed to master in order to be able to build the house.
You've got to be a plumber. You've got to be a electrician.
You've got to be able to hang...
Here's the limit.
I've never built a house. But you've got to be able to hang drywall.
You've got to, I don't know, know how to build a roof.
You've got to know how to sink a foundation.
You've got to build your sump pump.
You've got to build your... You go on and on, right?
So that was considered to be a rich and wonderful...
Situation. You were a skilled artisan.
Right, now maybe then, free market comes along, and you're now competing with individually specialized groups of workers, right?
So you've got your guy who does the electricals.
You've got your guy who does the plumbing.
He's a different guy. You've got the guy who hangs the drywall.
You've got the guy who builds the beams, who does the basement, who does the drainage, who does...
And they're all specialized and they're all experts and they can all work together rather than having one guy build the whole house.
Well, you can't compete with them.
I mean, you can in a way, like if you're some guy like, I don't know, Frank Lloyd Wright rolls up his sleeves and builds falling water on a weekend or whatever, right?
But you can't compete because the division of labor makes people more money.
You make more money specializing and combining your labor with other specialists than you do learning everything yourself and doing it all by yourself, right?
Now, the Marxists consider this, you're alienated from your labor.
It's like, why? Instead of being the jack of all trades, master of none, you become the master of one trade, and richer thereby.
What's wrong with people choosing to specialize if that's what they prefer?
Hey, if you want to build a house, you can still go build a house, buy some land, spend five years building a house and go sell it or live in it.
But if you want to make more money, you're going to have to specialize to compete with everyone else who's specializing, who gives higher quality and faster production.
Now, this question came up in particular around the assembly line, Ford, the Model T, and how they made cars and all of that, because...
What happened originally to make a car was that you'd start building this car in the middle of this workshop, this factory, and everybody would bring all this junk, the wheels, and they'd bring it all and assemble a car.
Like a kid building a house with Lego goes and gets all these different Lego pieces, builds the house of Lego, right?
Now, what Ford did was he said, that doesn't seem very efficient to me.
Here's what we're going to do. We're going to create an assembly line.
And what we're going to do Is, you know, the first guy's gonna put the frame on.
The second guy's gonna put the wheels on.
The third guy's gonna put the chassis on.
The fourth one's gonna put the engine on.
The fifth one's gonna... And the car would flow down the assembly line and each worker would do something much more specialized than...
And would only need to know his particular thing to do, right?
And he was able to pay people out of...
Like, I think he paid twice the living...
Like, the average wage he was...
Because he was able to be that much more productive, right?
Now, if you want to build the whole car yourself, like the whole house, you can go build the whole car yourself.
Nobody's saying you can't. He didn't pass a law that said you can't.
But if you want to make more money, then you go specialize.
Now, if you get bored specializing, because you're smart, right?
I mean, it's funny because intellectuals look at jobs like manual labor jobs and say, this is the worst thing ever.
I can't believe how people can stand that.
That's horrible. We must have a system where people don't have to do that kind of manual labor.
It's like... I've worked with manual laborers.
I've done manual labor. I've worked with waiters.
I've worked with factory workers.
I've moved furniture.
I've dug wells and ditches.
It's fine. It's fine.
You get to think for yourself.
You can listen to some music if there's some...
Oh, I remember...
Oh, man. I was just thinking of this the other day.
The song Start Me Up by The Stones came on, and I remember putting together a shelving store in a mall when I was in my mid-teens.
And that song came on and that riff was just like burned in my brain.
A little snippet of history I'm going to now put out to the planet forever.
It would have been lost in time otherwise.
And so if you want to not...
If you want to specialize and make more money because it's more economically productive, who's to say you shouldn't or can't?
Who are these complete jerkozoids who feel that you can't make that decision?
You are alienated from your labor.
You're being exploited, man.
It's like, just let people choose.
Some people want to work super, super hard and make a lot of money.
I'm not going to tell them, I mean, maybe I'll say, you know, the work balance and all that, life balance and so on, but it's their choice.
I know, pass a law that says they can't.
What kind of arrogance is that?
I force you to do it my way.
I did it my way with a gun.
And other people, they want to work less because they work to live, right?
Some people live to work, some people work to live, right?
They want to go camping on the weekend.
They want to play video games.
They want to write the great novel.
They don't want to work that much.
They enjoy time with their family.
They enjoy their hobbies.
They just, you know, they go to work seven hours a day or whatever.
What's wrong with that? Some people want to be the boss.
I mean, it's a funny thing, too. What the workers do is visible to the boss, but what the boss do is rarely visible to the workers.
When I worked in a hardware store, the boss had these stairs at the back.
Everything in a hardware store used to be dirty.
Not that way now, but this guy had this tiny little cubby, and we'd be down there dealing with customers and cutting keys and cutting glass, and I used to take money to the bank to deposit, because everybody knows when you're honest, right?
And I remember I went up to the...
Tony, his name was.
I got up to the boss and he'd just be sitting there like writing and he'd make some phone calls and, you know, be like, well, we're down here working and you're just up there sitting in your office, right?
This is one of the reasons why it's easy to sow resentment to these kinds of situations, right?
But some workers...
They go to night school, and they'll talk to the boss, and they'll go out for lunch, and they'll ask how to do it, and they'll offer to help.
Great. Then they can move up if they want.
Other people, literally, I mean, if you haven't spent time around, quote, workers, right?
The boss is often even a harder worker.
It's just mental rather than physical, usually.
I mean, he's the one ordering the parts and making sure the taxes are compliant and complying with all the regulations and making sure the banking is steady and getting loans if necessary.
All the things that the workers don't.
I just moved this machine and magic money.
But if you've ever dealt with the, quote, proletariat, the sort of manual laborers, whew.
They look at the foreman and the boss with pity a lot of times, like, man, you couldn't pay me enough to do that job.
The stress, the angry customers, the big problems with failures in quality, and especially just-in-time manufacturing, where you reach for something and it's got to be right there in your hand, and if it's not right there in your hand, you get sued from here.
Very few people who are working Who, when they walk out, you know, you've got this foreman being yelled at by the boss because something's late and, you know, it's like, hey man, I get to go home and it's Miller time, right?
And the foreman's... Right?
They don't want that job. And who's to say they should have it?
I don't know. I like things more complicated.
I'm glad that I'm not doing manual labor anymore.
But I'm fine with the people who do.
And there's certainly times, haven't you ever had this, when you have a challenging time with whatever high conceptual crap you're doing, where it's like, man, just give me a shovel.
Give me a shovel. That's going to get memed.
Give me a shovel and I'll save the world.
Actually, I'll just make a hole. So, yeah.
What's wrong with this alienated labor?
It's like, they'd rather have money than a more complicated job.
They'd rather have money than have to learn a new skill.
Sure. Everyone can make...
Hey, if you want to make the whole car, make it yourself.
No one is going to stop you.
If you have to charge more for it and you can't compete, well, that's just the reality of other people choosing to be more efficient than you, economically.
Again, it's not a system.
It's not a system. To better understand how Marx achieved his lasting global impact, an impact arguably greater and wider than any other philosophers before or after him, we can begin with his relationship to Hegel.
What was it about Hegel's work that so captivated Marx as he informed his father?
Early encounters with Hegel's system, which builds itself upon layer after layer of negations and contradictions, hadn't entirely won him over.
Marx found that the late 18th century idealisms of Immanuel Kant and Johann Gottlieb Ficht that so dominated philosophical thinking in the early 19th century prioritized thinking itself.
Wow, a philosophical system that prioritizes thinking.
Wow. Whatever next?
A manufacturing system that prioritizes manufacturing?
Sorry. Ah, this is why I'm here and not a professor.
Prioritize thinking itself so much so that reality could be inferred through intellectual reasoning.
But Marx refused to endorse their reality in an ironic Hegelian twist.
It was the complete opposite. It was the material world that determined all thinking, as Marx puts it in his letter.
If previously the gods had dwelt above the earth, now they became its center.
The idea that God or gods dwelt among the masses or was in them was, of course, nothing philosophically new, but Marx's innovation was to stand idealistic deference not just to God but to any divine authority on its head, whereas Hegel had stopped at advocating a rational liberal state.
Wait. Oh, sorry.
Not stopped short of, but stopped at advocating a rational liberal state, which he didn't.
Marx would go one stage further.
Since the gods were no longer divine, there was no need for a state at all.
Hmm. The idea of the classless and stateless society would come to define both Marx's and Engels' idea of communism.
And, of course, a subsequent and troubled history of the communist states.
Troubled history!
You know, 100 million dead.
Yeah, I guess that's troubled.
Kind of stretching the word a little bit there.
You know, troubled. Troubled history of the six million slaughtered in the Holocaust.
It's troubled, according to this theory.
Wretched. Wretched.
It's not troubled history.
It's a murderous, murderous, murderous history.
All right, sorry, let me rewind a smidge, rewind a smidge, right?
So, when he talks about...
The state. The stateless stuff, right?
So the classless, stateless society in the end was one of the ideals.
So the quote here, the idea of the classless and stateless society would come to define both Marx's and Engels' ideas of communism.
And of course, the subsequent and troubled history of the communist states, ironically enough, that materialized during the 20th century.
There is still a great deal to be learned from their disasters, but their philosophical relevance remains doubtful, to say the least.
The key factor in Marx's intellectual legacy in our present-day society is not philosophy, but critique.
Or what he described in 1843 as the ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless, both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be.
Yeah, it's a brave guy living off the proletariat as he did.
And also, by the way, banging his maid and dumping her in the street when she was pregnant to make sure that nobody figured out that he fathered a bastard child.
So you see there, he's a capitalist.
She's a worker. He has sex with the worker.
He bangs his maid, throws her into the street when she's pregnant.
And then tries to suppress anybody's knowledge of it.
Because you see, the bourgeoisie is so terrible and you have to just love the working class and be there for the working class.
Unless you're banging them and dumping them in the street with your child in their belly.
Excuse me. Hideous. Just hideous.
The writer of the article quotes Marx.
The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways.
The point is to change it!
Stevie Ray Vaughan song in my head now.
He wrote in 1845.
Racial, the article goes on, racial and sexual oppression have been added to the dynamic of class exploitation.
Oh, by the way, Marx, hideous racist as well.
O-M-G-G-G. Hideous, hideous racist.
You can just Google that stuff for yourself or use some other search engine.
Probably wiser to use some other search engine.
Just, yeah, Marx, N-word, hideous racist.
Okay. He goes on to say, So who's the ruling class these days?
I wonder. Who is the ruling class?
Is it, say, the conservatives?
Who cannot give speeches at university campuses without being often physically attacked or having their speeches shut down or out of fear of leftist violence.
Remember, revolutionary terrorism is the way to go to get your ideal society.
The conservative or non-leftist speakers Who face outrageous, outrageous security costs out of fear of feral leftists attacking them.
Is that the ruling class?
Maybe the ruling class, you see, is, I don't know, tenured university professors who are protected by the state and who exploit through their salaries and through government subsidized or guaranteed student loans who exploit young people and workers.
Who are profiting from a system that has 17 and 18 year olds sign multi-decade sometimes massive debt instruments in order to fund indoctrination into leftist ideals that are economically destructive to their future.
In other words, laden them down with debt while at the same time giving them not just no value in the market but negative value in the market and you teach them to hate the free market and wealth and success.
It would seem to me...
Government schools. Government schools would be the ruling class because money is taken from people by force to fund the indoctrination of children into a worship of the state.
So when you're talking about the ruling class, Well, we'll get to the numbers in a second, but the ruling class at the moment is statism and is leftism.
That is the ruling class. It is all over the place in television.
It's all over the place in the media. It is all, like, was it 95% or 97% of reporters in Washington, D.C. were Democrats?
Come on. Come on.
Look at the proportion of leftists versus conservatives in academia.
The ruling class is exactly this guy, and he thinks he's being a revolutionary.
It's astounding! He goes on to say, What is he suggesting?
Is he... Does he endorse Marx's commitment to political terrorism?
Does he? This is general...
I'm asking this of Marxists as a whole.
I don't know if this guy's a Marxist.
Sounds that way. I mean, if it's Happy Birthday Marx, you were right.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say kind of on the Marxist.
Do you endorse the revolutionary violence that Marx endorsed?
Do you endorse, since Marx and Engels both co-wrote the Communist Manifesto and Engels wrote...
Longingly of genocide of class enemies, do you endorse that?
And if you don't, why not?
Goes on to say, to cite Marx, no social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.
Statement, statement, statement.
Revolution! Word salad!
Death cult! Goes on to write, To keep citing him and testing his ideas until the kind of society that he struggled to bring about.
And that increasing numbers of us now desire is finally realized!
Okay, first of all, it has been realized many times in the past.
It's just always a ruthless, blood-soaked, bodies-piled-to-the-mountains-of-the-moon horror show.
So, yeah, this idea.
And this weird thing is like, well, we want to be paid for our relationships to each other rather than our relationship to the means of production.
What does that mean? You know, if you're paying people just for themselves, I guess prostitution is the highest idea.
Well, no, they have the means of production called vagina, or penis, or anus, or mouth, or Lord knows what the heck goes on in these kinds of situations, but I'm sure I'll be informed by a couple of trolls at least below.
So yeah, the transition to a new society where relations among people, rather than capital relations, finally determine an individual's worth What does that mean?
Because economic worth is not the same as worth as a whole.
It's a subset, right? So if you look at a traditional family structure, I know if you're a Marxist, your head just exploded.
But if you look at a traditional family structure, you've got a husband being the product room provider, going out to get work, get money, and then bringing it home to his wife, who's running his household and raising his children.
Well, the...
Husband is being paid by the capitalist.
And again, I'm just using these words.
We're all capitalists. But, I mean, people seek profit through political power.
If you look at... I mean, this is what Winston Smith said.
Sorry, Winston Smith was told by O'Brien in 1984 when he said, oh man, this coffee's good.
He's like, yes, I'm sorry this doesn't get out to the out-of-party members much, right?
I mean, look at the communist leaders with their homes and their dachas on the Black Sea and the...
I mean... They profited.
They profited. Hillary Clinton, on a government salary, seems to have made quite a lot of money.
When Bill Clinton left the White House, they were broke from legal bills, and now they have hundreds of millions of dollars.
It's a Christmas miracle.
So people profit.
People profit in communism.
They try to get political power.
They try to gain control. They become wealthy.
Our desire to get more for less is...
Why we ended up at the top of the food chain.
It's why we are the dominant species on the planet.
I mean, you can't get rid of that.
Our thirst for power, our thirst for control, our thirst for more resources with less effort.
Can't get rid of it. You can either have it channeled into the free market where people create wealth and accumulate resources by serving the needs of others in a voluntary context.
You can either take our desire to get more for less and channel it through the free market into productive energy.
Economic growth within society and the production of goods and services that people want and are willing to pay for voluntarily, or you can create a hellscape of political power, violence, coercion, debt, and a nightmarish set of dominance and subjugation relationships, in which case, instead of creating an iPhone, you create a gulag. Instead of creating something wonderful, you create hell on earth, because people will always want more for less, they will always want something for nothing, and they love to dominate things.
People do it through sports. They sublimate it through dominating others in business contexts and so on.
Or you can give them massive political power and they can dominate each other through the armed might of the state and the foggy noose of fiat currency.
So the idea that you can wish away human beings' desire for dominance is a complete fantasy.
You can either turn them loose on the free market where it's voluntary and productive, or you can create the hellscape of oligarchical political control, in which case society devolves into a medieval barbarism.
Well, actually, it's kind of an insult to medievalism because they didn't have modern techniques of dominance and surveillance and weaponry.
So, what does it mean when people just have value?
Look, the man is paid by his boss.
He's paid by the company he works for.
He takes home the money and he gives most of the money to his wife.
This idea that, you know, men have been just this patriarchy, it's like, well, if it's a patriarchy, then why do women control 80 to 90% of domestic spending in the household, household spending?
Why, look, turn on the TV during the day when more women are home than men?
You don't see a lot of ads for man caves and super fast computers.
You see a lot of ads for, well, let's just face it, lady stuff in general, right?
So the man, you know, a bachelor needs like 10% of the money if he's got a household with a wife and kids and so on, right?
So now the woman, the mom, she's not being paid by an employer.
She's getting money, the majority of money earned by her husband.
But she's being paid for her relationship to the household, her relationship in particular to the children.
So she doesn't have a capital relation, she has a person relation.
But the person relation is fed by the capital relation, right?
Of the husband's relationship to the means of production, whatever that is, the company that he's getting paid by.
So there are tons and tons Of people who have relationships based on personal rather than capital relations.
Again, assuming that reproductive organs are not the means of production, which I guess, biologically, they really could be thought of as the primary means of production.
But look at women. You can see these websites.
Women who are looking for sugar daddies.
I don't know why that indicates a phone, but it does.
Women looking for sugar daddies, they're selling maybe potential sexual access, but even if there's no sexual access, they're selling arm candy, they're sending somebody to look good when they go out to social situations, escorts which don't provide sex are doing all of that kind of stuff.
A back rub, you know?
I mean, the means of production, what is that?
If somebody goes and gets you a massage and so on, you're not paying for their capital, you're paying for their hands or whatever, the hands of the means of production and so on, right?
So there's tons of situations wherein people gain...
Economic value, not by relations to capital, but relations to people.
And also, the children love the mom and love the father, but not just because they buy them things, right?
But they love the mother and they love the father because of the tenderness, the solicitude, the peaceful parenting, all of the good things that I've advocated on this show for many, many years.
So, the woman has value, the mom has value not in her relation to capital, but in her relation to her children.
So, it's all there.
And there's diversity, there's multiplicity for all of this.
And of course, if there is this idea that Marx says, well, the goal of communism, you see, is a classless and stateless society.
And if every single time communism is implemented, you end up with a rigidity of class and caste systems in communism that would be unimaginable in a free market environment.
Because you have the party members, you have the non-party members, you have the in, you have the out, you've got the kangaroo trials, you've got the gulags.
I mean, this is rigid, rigid class and caste, almost caste structures fundamentally.
And so, when you say, under communism, we're going to get a classless society, and you get a much more rigidly classist society than anything that occurs in the free market.
In the free market, there's a constant churn.
A constant churn.
My grandfather...
Great-grandfather. My grandfather.
My great-grandfather was very wealthy.
My grandfather was profligate.
And I was born into a very poor household.
I was born into a very low-rent environment and so on.
And I'm dragging myself up by my teeth up a ice cliff wall sometimes, it seems like.
So there's a constant churn. It's called rags to riches to rags in three generations, or shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations, right?
First guy's working billows, Nicolas Cage style.
Second guy's got a nice shirt and a collar and a tie.
And the third guy's out there working the bellows again, because that's the way things work, right?
There's an Arabic saying, you know, my grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a Cadillac, I will ride a camel.
If you look at the companies, the top 100 companies 100 years ago, I think only five of them are still in existence, and they're fairly unrecognizable from their old forms.
Constant churn. People get wealthier, people get poorer, there's this up, this down.
So in capitalism, there's no rigid class system.
But in communism, there is.
Now, capitalism, because getting away from the anarcho-capitalist arguments, which, of course, I advocate, but we don't have to get into all of that right now.
Let's just talk about a minarchist system, right?
So in a capitalist minarchist system, small government, Then you have a very, very small amount of taxation, maybe just a little bit of tariffs here and there, maybe not really, you can't really have any income taxes, a violation of fundamental property rights and can't be evaded.
Everyone has an income, therefore everyone gets taxed.
But you can evade, not evade, you can legally evade, avoid.
Sorry, avoid is, evasion is illegal, avoidant is fine.
You can avoid taxes on tariffs simply by not purchasing those taxes.
You can avoid tariffs on imports simply by not purchasing those imports.
So in a capitalist society, you've got very, very small government, very, very little.
Government is devoted to the police, the law courts, the military, and that's really about it.
The police to adjudicate disputes of a violent nature, the courts to adjudicate both disputes of a violent nature and disputes of a contractual nature and a military to defend the borders.
So that's the free market society.
Now that is a classless society insofar as there's a constant churn in the free market.
You can rise and fall depending on your ability and your conscientiousness and your efforts, your IQ and all.
And it is stateless relative to a communist society, which is a dictatorship.
Communism, you know, is like 90 to 100% ownership of the means of production, and the government owns like 3% of the means of production in a free market society, historically maybe 3% to 5%.
So the free market is a classless and stateless society, certainly relative to communism, which is a rigid class system and a massive status system.
So, 100 million dead.
I can't...
You know, some people, they pretend that it doesn't exist.
Ah, it wasn't real Marxism every single time.
Well, 100 million dead, man.
I'm telling you, if you can...
If you can just, like, skate over that, if you can just boing over that, if you can avoid that in your mind's eye, 100 million people slaughtered, murdered.
We're not even talking those whose lives were destroyed.
We're not even talking about people who were in gulags for 20 years.
We're not even talking about people who were maimed in useless wars or tried to revolt against the society.
This is direct deaths!
Direct deaths!
Hundreds of millions of people's lives fundamentally destroyed.
100 million killed. Can you just skate over that?
How? I mean, fundamentally, answer me this below.
Begging you. How?
How can you just or leap those bodies?
How is there a but in that?
It's like, it's like, I shouldn't laugh, this is horrifying.
It's like, it's like people saying, well, the Turks did kill a million to two million Christian Armenians, but it's like, no, no, no, no, no buts.
No but there. No however, no clause that dissociates from that first statement.
Well, Hitler did cause the deaths of 40 million people, but no.
No, no, no. There's no but there.
Period. Think.
It wasn't real Marxism.
Come on. Well, they didn't do this right or they didn't do that right.
They find some passage of Marx and so on.
Oh, come on. It's ridiculous.
It's ridiculous. When they say, not real Marxism, okay, the regimes that they're talking about, first of all, they called themselves Marxist.
And they genuinely accepted that they were implementing Marxist ideas.
And, and...
Intellectuals, man, I wrote about this in a poem when I was 19, it just...
This pilgrimage to Moscow for these intellectuals, particularly in the red 30s, 1930s.
The intellectuals, the Marxists, called those countries Marxist at the time.
They supported them.
They were enthusiastic. Contemporary Marxist intellectuals Said about these countries that were Marxist in principle, that were implementing Marxist policies and were called Marxist by the intellectuals of the time and enthusiastically supported by the intellectuals of the time, suddenly afterwards when the death tolls are found and the bodies are found and the gulags are found and the slaughters and the murders and the death is found, people are like, well, that wasn't real Marxism.
No! Marxist country implementing Marxist policies supported by Marxists.
Sorry, that's Marxism!
No ifs, ands, or buts.
That is Marxism!
And this empirical evidence that Marxism directly causes staggeringly unprecedented levels of death and devastation and destruction, that is a very real thing.
Where are we now?
Why is this so important?
Look. Everyone gets Nazism.
Well, they call it Nazism rather than National Socialism, because the socialists don't like being associated with that kind of body count.
But we all get that. Nazism is not a big threat to Western society, because everyone gets it, and they're opposed, and if there are any Nazis around, they're like ridiculous LARPers with no social power whatsoever, and who are regularly pushed back against and shamed and driven out of public life.
Right? Nazism, not a big issue.
But... The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto, is the single most frequently assigned text in college classrooms.
I mean, okay, other than Strunk and White Grammar Manual, which has to be handed out for the digital generation who've received terrible indoctrination rather than education at the hands of government teachers.
In schools, but, I mean, we can't really count the grammar manual, right?
We can't really count the grammar manual, which means that the Communist Manifesto is the most frequently assigned text in college classrooms.
You say, oh, well, it's very important.
It's like, well, if you look at the West, the West did not...
Found itself on communism.
The West found itself on small government, minarchism, liberalism, freedom of speech, freedom of trade, freedom of worship, freedom of occupation, property rights, economic freedoms.
So why not study people like John Locke?
Why not study people like Ayn Rand?
Why not study people like Ludwig von Mises?
Why? These are the people who have actually contributed to the founding of the West, or defense of the founding of the West for the later thinkers.
Why? I mean, I can understand if you've got a history of communism in the country studying communism as an opposition to it.
Crazy. And the numbers are going in the wrong way in terms of Marxist penetration into academia.
So in 1990, this is survey data from the Higher Education Research Institute, 42% of professors identified as liberal or far left.
42% in 1990.
Liberal or far left. Now, what is the relationship between far left and communism?
I don't know, but I'll tell you this, when people say far-right, they generally mean Nazism, right?
So, I don't know what Nazism is.
When people say far-right, they generally imply Nazism, so far-left implies Marxism?
Communism? So in 1990, only 42% of professors, liberal or far-left, by 2014, that number had jumped to 60%.
60%.
It jumped by 50% in less than 25 years.
Over the same period, the number of academics identifying as moderate fell by 13 percentage points.
And the share of conservative and far-right professors dropped to nearly six points.
In the academy, liberals now outnumber conservatives by about five to one.
And I think those numbers are even worse now.
This data is a little bit older. So, in the academy, you've got five to one plus liberals to conservatives.
In the general public, though, There are many, there are considerably more conservatives than liberals, right?
So then it's not a mirror of the general population.
It's quite the reverse. As recently as 2006, 18% of social scientists self-identified as Marxists.
18%! Well, that's not a very high percentage.
Well, actually it kind of is.
So we got 18% of social scientists who are self-identifying as Marxists.
They barely exist. Marxists barely exist in the physics or medicine or even economics quite as much.
18% self-identified as Marxists.
Now, of course, if they were 18% self-identifying as Nazis, everybody would lose their crap out of their left nostril.
So we got 18% social scientists, or want of a better phrase, self-identifying as Marxists.
24% of social scientists identify themselves as radical.
I'm pretty sure those aren't anarcho-capitalists.
When they say radical, I generally assume that they mean radical left, which is Marxist-ish.
Only about 5% of social scientists identify as conservatives.
Remember, conservatives outnumber liberals in the general population considerably, but only 5% of social scientists identify as conservatives.
If you go into the sociology faculty, 25.5% of faculty in sociology self-identify as Marxists.
Now, I gotta tell you, I hate to say that's a conservative assumption, but that's a conservative assumption.
So, more recent faculty surveys, where they just say, where are you on the left-right scale?
Since 2006, when it was already...
On Hule Lihai, since 2006, there's been a strong leftward shift in faculty ideology.
And so, you know, when a couple of hundred idiots get together to LARP as Nazis, everybody loses their minds.
In America, between the humanities and social sciences, There are almost 32,000 self-identified Marxists in the academy, in universities and colleges.
31,600 self-identified Marxists who have tenure, who have prestige, who get published, who are indoctrinating, because it's so rejected by reason and evidence, it has to be indoctrination, who are indoctrinating the young.
Is that a bigger issue?
Than Nazis? I think you could make the case that it is.
And this is why you know the left has no interest in it.
They say diversity, but diversity never includes conservatives, even though conservatives outnumber liberals in the general population.
A guy named George Yancey, he's a sociologist.
He's, oh, and if you're evangelical, forget it, right?
He's black and evangelical. He said, outside of academia, I face more problems as a black.
But inside academia, I face more problems as a Christian.
And it is not even close.
One study found, out of English professors, only 2% are Republicans.
Only 2% are Republicans.
And of course it's driven at least in part by discrimination.
One peer-reviewed study found that one-third of social psychologists admitted that if they had to choose between two equally qualified job candidates, they would be inclined to discriminate against the more conservative candidate.
Now that's just people who are willing to admit it.
If only two percent of English professors are conservatives, do you think that's an accident?
And remember, I've got a whole series of videos you should watch called Gene Wars, G-E-N-E Wars, Gene Wars.
Political leanings have significant biological bases.
So, if you look at males and females or races and so on, there are biological bases to these.
They're not just social constructs.
And if you discriminate against genetics or biological bases, you are considered to be prejudicial.
There are significant biological bases for political leanings.
If you're a liberal, if you're a conservative, you may have strong genetic predilections to those.
It's not absolute. We can still choose.
We can still change. I was originally a socialist.
Going back a little now, aren't we?
But yeah, you can learn better and you can figure things out.
So by rejecting conservatives, they're not just rejecting an ideology.
It is a form of genetic discrimination.
So this is where things stand.
You've got the New York Times, which has a history of pro-communism.
I mean, Walter Durante in the 1930s wrote entire articles praising Stalin and covering up the holodomor, the use of food as an absent bioweapon against communism.
Ukrainians, upwards of millions and millions, slaughtered.
Starved. Brutal.
Brutal. Same thing happened under Chairman Mao.
You could read Three Swans.
I mean, these people are so hungry, they were eating tree bark.
They were eating, you know, that flaky crap you get from the outside of garlic or onions.
They were ripping up pillows and they were eating the feathers inside of pillows.
It cannibalized when people died.
I mean, horrendous, horrendous stuff.
The amount of suffering that this ideology has caused is second perhaps only to one.
But this is where things stand.
It remains largely invisible to us, as a society, in this danger.
We need to wake up to what's going on, to how much indoctrination is going on, in what direction it's going on.
You know, a group of dedicated ideologues addicted to violence will always, always win against a large inert population that just wants to be let alone.
Well, they're not going to leave you alone!
And if you think it's going to be Nice to oppose them.
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