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June 20, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
50:15
The Communist Manifesto for Kids - Part 3!
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Alright, we are at the current rate.
This is show three. We're at like seven percent.
No, eight, eight, eight.
I figure we'll be done by the time either communism is vanquished or takes over.
I think that's when we'll be done.
That's the plan. Maybe actually when we're like in our graves we'll still be doing this and recording shows.
Yeah, that would actually be kind of an interesting philosophical proof like afterlife and ghosts and all of that.
No, but we'd just be stuck in our grave as zombies.
Right. All right.
So, now I want you to listen to this sentence.
Two sentences. I'm scared.
And just try and figure out whether Marx, what he thinks of the bourgeoisie, right?
Like the people who are upper middle class and all of that, right?
So he says, the bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations.
Now, idyllic means perfect.
Oh? Like your family life is...
You put an end to perfect relationships?
Yeah. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley, the various futile ties that bound man to his natural superiors and has left remaining no other nexus or relationship between man and man other than naked self-interest.
Then callous cash payment.
There are about 20 words in there that I had no idea what they meant.
All right, we'll go back over this, right? So he's saying whenever the bourgeois gets control, it destroys all feudal patriarchal, which means men in charge, idyllic relations.
So he's saying that, you see, when the guy who worked on the Lord's lands was half a slave, that was about as perfect a relationship as you could possibly have.
Wow, he sounds great.
It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his natural superiors.
Now that's to me kind of odd, because what he's saying is that the people who voluntarily trade with others are really, really nasty and ugly and vicious, but the lords who controlled people as half-slaves, that was idyllic. And that they were the natural superiors of the people who worked the land.
Oh, my God. Now, that is a little confusing to me because he seems to dislike those who have economic control over others.
But, okay, let's just ask this.
We love to go to malls from time to time.
We call it toodling around, right?
Yeah. We don't have anything to buy in particular.
We just wander around. Occasionally, we'll get something from, like, Lesher, a food court or whatever, but...
We'll have a little play.
We bought some jelly soaps and threw them around as toys.
We bought... Oh my god, that was hilarious.
That was hilarious. Do you remember we bought...
It was like a moon ball or something.
We tried throwing it over the signs in the mall until the security guards told us to stop.
All that kind of stuff, right? And we were planning to do it again, but we never got around to it because we never were allowed to go to a mall again without my mom.
That's right. She basically put a stop to that.
Now, when we go to the mall...
Do you feel that the mall store owners are bullying you or bossing you or telling you what to do?
No. Why not?
They're there. They have stuff.
They want our money. It's pretty much the same as being robbed, don't you think?
But it's your choice if you buy anything.
It's your choice if you want to buy something.
They're not like, buy this soap or else we're going to hit you with an ax.
Well, no, but you see, they make it look appealing.
Yeah, but it's not bullying.
I mean, okay, let me put it to you this way.
When we go to, we won't name a particular store in general, a restaurant.
So we go to some place to eat, right?
And they have pictures of their food.
How good does that food look?
Good. You open the box.
Can I name one?
No, no, no. Let's not name one.
Everybody knows. We'll keep it theoretical.
No, I have to. It's hurting me.
Fine. Fine. It's some old person who has a farm.
Anyway, but that's stealing, you see, because they make it look different than what you actually open up.
They might as well be taking a kidney out of your body with a fork.
Okay, I'm not going to say anything, but just look at these videos online.
Of how they prepare the food, right?
Maybe something like food expectations versus reality.
Yeah, you all have to prep food for an ad, right?
They really make it look pretty, right?
So anyway, nobody forces you to buy anything.
Okay, well, I mean, in the free market, we're not talking about the government, but in the free market, the people offer you stuff, but they can't force you to buy it.
Yeah. And so I don't know what...
But the guy who controls your land and forces you to work on it and all of that and buys and sells you with the land, he controls you.
Yeah, and also apparently it's a perfect relationship.
So he doesn't like...
He doesn't like the fact that there's no other relationship between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous cash payment.
Now, when somebody wants to sell us something, do they care about our happiness or do they care about our money?
I think they care a bit about both.
Yeah, that's right. Because if they sell something to us and we don't like it, okay, what's the worst purchase you've ever made?
Oh, I know one!
Tell me. Okay, so we were down in Niagara Falls, and do you remember there was that, it looked like something that kind of ran over rocks, and it was like a spidery thing.
Oh yeah, it really, it looked like it was super cool.
It looked so cool. I mean, me and both of my friends, the same friends, I think I talked about it last video, or in one of the previous videos, but we all got one because it looked so cool, and they had this video, and it looked like it could climb through trees and stuff.
Yeah, and it was just something on a string.
It was just something on a string.
And the string was probably not even a foot long, but they had it move and the kid was at least three feet away on the video.
Yeah, it really, that to me was a little bit not on the super honest side.
No, that was really not honest at all.
They should have said, by the way, they should have actually just shown how bad it was.
So when I was a kid, there was something you could order on the back of comic books.
You don't even know what a comic... Oh no, no, because you've read the graphic novel of Wings of Fire, right?
Yes. So it's like that, but a comic book? Book two, and I've only read book one and three online.
So on the back of the comic books, you could order something called Water Monkeys.
And they had little, that was like an aquarium, and it looked like little monkeys.
And you know what you got? What?
A bag of shrimp. Like baby shrimp or something.
I can't even remember. I never ordered it, but a friend of mine did.
And it was like the most horrifying and disappointing thing that could happen.
So there's all that stuff on the edges.
It's like, well, it's kind of not, I mean, you can call them water monkeys, but they're not really like cool little monkeys that you can train and stuff like that that live in water.
Which, you know, if you talk about it with your parents, they'll say, yeah, there aren't tiny water monkeys that you can train.
So there's this kind of stuff on the edge.
But if you don't, if you're not happy with the purchase, then you can usually take it back for a refund.
But if you can't, or even if you keep buying stuff and it's not, you just don't go back.
Right. So if they care about only your money but not your happiness, they don't stay in business for too long, usually.
If they only care about your happiness and undercharge, then they'll probably go out of business too.
So they have to, you're right, they have to care about both, right?
Yeah. Yeah. He says, the bourgeoisie, this cash transaction, it has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies, that's about as much happiness as you can get, of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm.
So chivalry is when a man opens the door for a woman.
There's a famous sort of example of a queen who had to walk across a muddy puddle.
And one of the princes threw his cloak down so she wouldn't have to step on the mud.
That's like chivalry.
Oh, when a ship goes down in the ocean and they save who?
The women and children.
So that's called chivalry.
So he's saying it's drowned.
The bourgeoisie have drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor.
That means really believing in God and being happy about it.
Of chivalrous enthusiasm.
Of Philistine sentimentalism.
Oh boy, that's it.
So Philistine.
I'm sorry, what does that mean?
So, Philistine is considered to be when you're interested in cultural stuff that's kind of trashy.
Like, if you like sort of fake wrestling, if you never listen to any really quality music, but you just like really easy to...
It's like junk food of culture rather than a good meal.
And listen, I mean, I have tastes all over the map.
I like really refined stuff.
I like really, quote, philistine stuff.
Well, me, it's like... Raffles, give me all of them and also stuff like Subway.
Oh, I'll see. I'll take the sub with like veggies and a little tiny bit of sauce.
Yeah, or when we go to Peter Pit, we order veggies and stuff, right?
Yeah, so we have Sonia.
Except for the fact that I almost never eat meat, but that's it.
So it has resolved personal worth into exchange value.
So he's saying that when you get a free market, the only thing that people care about is making money from each other.
The only relationship they have is cash with each other.
Which is just kind of not true because you have friendships that aren't based on money.
You have parent-child relationships, your husband-wife relationships, all of these.
I mean, there may be money involved in that, you know, to have a child, you've got to spend some money, but you don't...
I don't pay you to be my child.
No. I don't pay X, Y, Z. I don't pay my friends to be my friends.
I don't pay my listeners to listen to me.
So there is a lot of relationships that aren't financial in the world, right?
And he said, I don't know what that means exactly.
It has set up that single unconscionable freedom, free trade.
In one word, for exploitation veiled by religious and political illusions, naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation!
What the heck? So, exploitation is when you take much more value out of someone than you give to them.
That's called exploitation.
I don't think I do a lot of that with my candy shop.
I'm just saying. No, because it's all voluntary.
Yeah. I mean, well, obviously, based upon my addiction to chocolate, it's not really voluntary for me, and you're exploiting my addiction.
Sorry, go ahead. No, no, not that.
I mean, even though, like, I'm not way overcharging for the chocolates or anything.
Yeah. No, you're not.
Listen, there's no such thing as overcharging.
You charge what people will pay.
Yeah, and you'll pay $1.25 for my chocolates.
I will, because they're really good, and I like that mixture, especially the white chocolate, the milk chocolate, and that score crumble on top is so good.
Well, I typically do, I'll do, my gosh, I'll do 26 white chocolates, just as for the mini set.
You mean the little chips? Yeah, white chocolate chips.
Yeah. And four dark chocolate squares, although the squares are bigger than the chips.
That's right. And they're kind of like chunky squares and stuff.
And I'll do that and then I can get typically eight, sometimes, occasionally, I'll be able to get nine of the mini chocolates.
Right, right, right. Depending on how big they make.
Yeah, so everyone feels that everything is overcharged because I'd love to pay a penny for everything.
Me too. But, you know, to me, there's no such thing as overcharging if you know you're overcharging when no one's selling buying, right?
Yeah. But overcharging or over...
But no one's been buying recently, so maybe you have to lower the prices again.
Well, that's because you decided to accept a candy shop and I'm off sugar.
Anyway. I'm sorry.
I set it up and then you went off sugar like a day afterwards.
I know. It's a shame. All right.
Are you ready? Okay. The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto, which means in the past, honored and looked up to with reverent awe.
What does that mean? Okay, so let's see.
Okay, listen. There's stuff that people do.
I don't know how they do it.
I look at...
So, for instance, I tried learning guitar when I was younger.
All I did was hurt my fingers.
Oh, my God, with piano? You had the same thing with piano.
You and I both sat down and tried to learn piano, right?
Well, yes. I was sort of forced into it by someone.
Forced? No, it's not forced.
Forced? I'm kidding. Oh.
I'm kidding. We exploited you for wage slave.
I'm kidding. I'm sorry. Just kidding. No, we strongly encouraged you to try an instrument.
Yeah, of course. No, but I remember the only thing that happened was I guess I made some pretty noise on a piano.
You wrote a couple of songs.
I didn't actually write them.
Well, you memorized them, right?
Because I cannot write anything in a whole different language, or at least a whole language I did not make because I've made a language when I was younger and it never really went anywhere, but whatever.
And I just remember the only thing that happened was I had sore hands for a couple hours afterwards.
Yeah. Right. So, to me, guitarists, it's a kind of magic.
I like to sing, and when I listen to a real singer, like Fazio, what's the name of the woman?
Faoiza, Mom says. What?
I don't know. What's her song?
That's her singer, Born Without a Heart, and there's like, You Don't Even Know Me.
And she's the one, it does a little bit of the goat sound.
You call it goat. No, Mom doesn't like it, but I like it.
Mom hates her. I don't think I hate her.
She likes one song, and that's it.
She wants her to fix that, but she's got it.
So when I listen to singers who can really sing, I'm kind of in awe.
Like, I know they didn't earn it, like, this is the voice they're born with, and they've taken training and all of that.
So there's some things that people do that I think is just...
Incredible. I have kind of awe.
Is there anyone, do you see them do something?
Or maybe gymnasts or something, you look at that and you say, oh my gosh, how do they do that work on the beam where they cartwheel like some epileptic spider, their legs are flying all over the place, but they still land on the beam?
I honestly think a waste of time.
I mean, I took gymnastics lessons.
I've actually been on and off like two or three times.
Yes, you have. Two times, I think.
And all I remember is I typically hurt myself every single lesson.
Like one time I had a thing in my neck that hurt for a day or something.
And the other time I got bruises and all that.
So I hurt myself. I mean, not on purpose or anything, but I just fell or I landed awkwardly or something.
And I think a waste of time and a lot of pain overall, in general.
Or you think about our friend, I won't give her name, but our friend who was the amazing dancer.
Yes. I don't know if you remember seeing the video.
Yeah, I do. And I was just like, she's like, she's flying and floating.
It's like she's on some different planet with lower gravity.
That's amazing to me.
Because I took some dance in theater school.
You suck at dancing. Really?
You know what? You don't suck. You're just not very good.
I'm good at freeform dancing.
Like I'm just dancing around to music.
But if it's like learning steps and stuff like that.
No, no, it's not for me. My God, me with steps, I'm just like, why are we just moving around like slugs?
Right. I just, like, why? So what he's saying here...
Every job that was honored and looked up to with awe, so he's saying the bourgeoisie has converted the physician, doctor, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science into its paid wage laborers.
In other words, instead of just worshiping the physician, the physician just charges you money and heals you.
And I don't really understand the difference of that, but I can tell you what I think is going on with this guy.
So, do you remember?
Oh, this is a long time ago.
We did a fable called The Fox and the Sour Grapes.
So there's this fox desperate to eat some grapes.
I don't know if fox eats grapes.
I don't think they do, but this is the story, right?
Yeah. And there's this, it's called a trellis.
It's like a little, it's like a wooden tunnel that's very sort of thin and slats and you can have plants growing all of it.
It's sort of like, they look like crosswords or hashtags or whatever.
Okay. So there are some grapes at the very top that look super sweet.
And he tries jumping and jumping and jumping to get those grapes, but he can't reach it.
And then do you know what he says when he walks away?
What? Oh, those grapes were probably sour anyway.
Because he can't get them, though he desperately wants them.
I vaguely remember that. Yeah.
So because he can't get the grapes, and...
He gets annoyed at them. I make a joke about this with Rocket League, which is mostly a joke.
So if we're playing a map and I lose, first of all, I say, I love this map.
And then when I'm losing, what do I say?
Oh, such a dumb map.
I hate this map. Right?
I mean, it's kind of a joke, right? So people do that.
I mean, it's a bit of a joke, but sometimes you'll say, hmm, not a bad map.
I don't mind it too much. And then you're like, I really dislike this map.
So, yeah.
So, listen, Marx never had a job.
He tried to get jobs, but nobody wanted to work with him because he was smelly.
He barely bathed.
He had these big boils all over his face.
And his handwriting was terrible.
And this is a time before typewriter, so you really needed good handwriting to write.
He tried to get a job as just a clerk, which is just somebody who writes down stuff and sends letters.
He couldn't even get that.
So I think that one of the reasons he hated...
Free trade was that he was worth nothing.
He wrote this book called Das Kapital or about money.
But he sold almost no copies.
He made no money. He was reliant upon a friend of his who ran a factory to pay all his bills.
And so even Marx's mom said, I wish that he'd actually make some money instead of just writing about it all the time and being broke.
And so I think the part, it's like the sour grapes, you know, like he was worth very little in the free market, and so he hates the free market because the free market doesn't care about him.
So he says, the bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.
Now, I don't understand that at all.
I don't either. I don't understand that at all.
Um... What does that mean?
That, what, people pay each other for everything now?
I don't understand it.
Like, hey, friend, can I pay you $10 if you'll be my friend type of thing?
Oh, that's so sad, right? The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigor...
Oh, sorry. I stalled.
Go on. Rebooting. I think I know why he said that thing that would pay everyone for everything.
Yeah, yeah. Is because his friend paid him...
I haven't thought of that. That's right.
See, I'm a genius. Yeah, very good.
All right. I'm going to blow on the microphone to give everybody...
No, no, don't blow on the microphone.
Just so that anybody...
Rest in peace, headphone users.
People are going to sleep listening to this. Yeah, yeah. No, they shouldn't.
I mean, I'm probably going to scream if someone gets tickled.
That's when I first heard that phrase.
It's when I did a show with these two women who are big Trump supporters, Diamond and Silk, they call themselves.
And they were very chatty, very funny, very smart.
But yeah, people were like, wow, that's a little hard on the headphones.
All right. Yes, that's what I was going to say.
Rest in peace, headphone users. I'm about to blow on the microphone.
So he says, the bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigor in the Middle Ages, which reactionists so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence.
A slothful indolence.
I don't really know what... I kind of can't...
The brutal display of vigor in the Middle Ages, does he mean war?
Does he mean... I don't know what exactly he means.
Found its fitting complement to the most slothful indolence.
What is that? I don't know. It has been the first to show what man's activity can bring about.
Now, it has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts.
So aqueducts were very famous bridges that carried water.
Really amazing stuff.
And Gothic cathedrals, which are giant churches.
It has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former exoduses of nations and crusades.
Anyway, so he's basically saying that the bourgeoisie...
Oh, I get what he's saying.
Okay, so he's basically saying that everyone thought that a whole bunch of people had lots of energy in the Middle Ages because they farmed and they built the first towns and all of that.
And he's saying, but the bourgeoisie have done stuff that's way more amazing.
And they basically make the Middle Ages people look totally lazy.
What are the Middle Ages? The Middle Ages was the time...
So there's the Roman Empire that collapses.
And then there's the Dark Ages, which that was like, no, this is when people began running to these lords to protect them from the bandits and the warlords.
And the Middle Ages is when they began to be better farming, new towns, new cities, and more...
That was good. And writing.
And they also had the late Middle Ages, they had the printing press, because before all books had to be written out by hand.
So they were very rare and very expensive.
The printing press, you could just print off books like crazy.
And the flood of books and reading and all of that was an amazing, amazing.
It was basically, you know how the Internet allows us to spread this show to hundreds of thousands or millions of people over time.
We don't have to go to everyone's house and do this show for them.
So when they had the printing press, that was like the Internet of its time.
It just allowed them to spread knowledge in a way that was impossible before.
Right.
It has... Okay, so basically he's saying that the bourgeoisie have done amazing things.
So this is kind of weird.
But he says he hates them. Because they're saying it's all terrible, but boy have they done incredible things, right?
And then he says, the bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production.
But you just said they were great.
Well, so... Constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production.
Now listen, we know this.
So you weren't even born when I first started the show, right?
I first started the show.
I was driving in my car and had a $20 headset.
It didn't sound good.
There was lots of background noise.
And then I bought a webcam.
Have you ever seen this on YouTube?
Like 240p? It's like really blocky.
It's not quite Minecraft, but that was my first bit, right?
That was my first bit of the show.
It was a bad microphone and bad video.
And you couldn't even like YouTube and that, but they only had 240p back then.
Right. Now the lowest is 780p, right?
So 240 is 320 pixels.
By 240 pixels.
Now, I usually put out 1080 pixels by 768.
And back then it was 30 frames a second.
Now you can do 60 or 120 frames a second.
Remember we were watching those slow motion plants growth?
Oh yeah. Really pretty, right?
But back then, so... And now I didn't have a studio.
I just, you know, now I have like a studio.
I've got good cameras.
I've got a nice microphone. I've got an amp.
So I'm revolutionizing or upgrading my instruments of production.
Okay, so what's wrong with that?
I mean, you're supposed to just stay the same forever no matter what changes, right?
No. Look at me, my candy shop has literally changed.
I typically change it every couple weeks.
I'll add new stuff, I'll change it around and stuff.
Well, do you remember we were cleaning out a closet in my study and we came across your old pictures, right?
Oh, and I said I was going to redraw them.
Redraw them with new, right? Because they were really bad.
Well, they weren't bad. I mean, I was six and I was starting to draw, but I mean, they were like, I did one wing, one front leg, one back leg, no underbelly, no shading.
And the wings were so weird, they were like up and then like a zigzag at the top of them.
So back then you were drawing in crayon and pen.
Right now you draw with like soft pencils and you shade and you have a whole bunch of different pencils.
So you draw on proper drawing paper?
I actually don't. Is it just printable?
I mean, I know the drawing paper was, like, I found it super soft, and I press down really hard when I start drawing.
Right. Which is... You leave a trail of fire, I think.
No, some people could say it's a mistake, like, because it's typically sketched out light.
But I have a way of drawing.
I've got to say I'm pretty good at drawing.
Mm-hmm. But I... So I draw hard.
And then I start adding in details as I go, which is odd because a lot of people get the shape and then start adding in.
But no, me, I will start, eh, I'm kind of bored of doing the underbelly.
Let's start with the rocks below and stuff.
Right, right. So if you still had to do your pictures with thick crayons and pen, how would they look?
Really bad. Bad, right?
So you have upgraded your means of production, how you make the pictures, right?
And what's wrong with that? That seems perfect.
You don't want to stay the same forever. Okay.
So then he says, conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence of all earlier industrial classes.
So he's basically saying, nothing changed in the past.
Right, so people, how would they make crops?
Well, they'd go by hand, or maybe they'd have a shovel or something like that.
They'd go by hand, they'd plant all of this stuff, and then they'd gather it and so on.
And now, you know, we've seen sometimes when we're driving in the country, these big giant combine harvesters that are out there driving and picking up all the wheat and so on.
So he's basically saying that in the past, nothing changes.
Nothing changed with how things were made.
Which, okay, so what?
I mean, that's bad, I think.
He said, So he's basically saying, in the past, nothing changed.
And that was great. But now, everything keeps changing.
People buy new machines, they upgrade things, and you can see this with computers.
You know, a computer that would fill the size of the room Has less computing power than this tiny cell phone.
Yeah. In like 30 years ago, 40 years ago, right?
Yeah. My very first computer that I worked on had 4K of memory.
Now 4K, you go K, megabyte, gigabyte, terabyte.
I want to have 700 terabytes now.
Yeah, it had, you know, thousands and thousands of times less memory than a cell phone.
Well, my... My tablet has 32...
Gigabytes. Gigabytes.
And it's so...
I'm going to say great because just the tablet we're using on, it only has 16 gigabytes, right?
It's constantly running out. You can't even update anything.
Oh, yeah. Like, I mean, I remember I used to use this tablet and...
Yeah, yeah. It was just...
It was so bad. It was annoying, right?
It was annoying because I kept trying to...
I'm like, oh, why don't I get a game or something, right?
Yeah. And then it was like, no space.
And it's like, oh, what game can I uninstall now type of thing?
Oh, what's annoying too is that you install it, you move it to the SD card to get it off the main memory, which is an expansion thing.
And then when you update, it puts it back on the main memory.
It's a mess. Anyway, so we want things to upgrade.
So he says, all fixed, fast, frozen relations with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away.
Okay, so he's basically saying, it's so confusing, because before he says, well, the serfs looked up to their natural superiors, and now he's saying, well, the fact that there were serfs and lords is prejudice, and it's very confusing.
But one thing that's true is a hatred of progress, right?
Yes, that's the one thing I can say that's true about this book.
So he says all of the old fixed relationships are swept away.
All the new formed relationships become antiquated before they can ossify.
So antiquated means like becoming way old and obsolete.
Ossify means to harden.
Okay, so we've done that.
Slime, if you leave it out.
Oh yeah, I do that.
I get glow-in-the-dark slime.
I leave it out for a couple days and then I flip it over and then it hardens and I can put it on my nightdress or something and if I leave my light on, it will glow in the dark.
Because you have a fascination with things that glow, like my forehead in the sun.
All right. Well, I don't know.
Maybe if you don't put on so much sunscreen, it would glow a bit more.
He says, all that is solid melts into air.
All that is holy is profaned.
Now, what's funny, too, is that Marx said that religion was the opiate of the masses.
In other words, it was a drug that was applied to people to keep them kind of...
So why he's talking about all the wonderful holy things here when he hates religion is confusing to me.
I don't either. And man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind.
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe.
It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.
Okay, so I like it when people listen to my podcasts all over the world and there's almost no country in the world that doesn't have people listening to my podcast.
But what's wrong with that? If they speak English, if they like philosophy, if they're interested in what we're saying, you and I are going to be heard, no pressure, in Canada, in Australia, in America.
I'm scared, I'm running away.
In Yugoslavia. It's going to be in Russia, in you name it, right?
There's going to be everywhere.
Really someone's going to hear it.
I've got a list of all the countries, and I haven't found a single country.
Somalia people, like, all over the place people listen to this show.
So what? Don't you want that?
Would I say, well, you can only listen to my show if you live within five miles of my house?
I think that would make no sense, right?
I think you get, like, two views. Yeah, whatever, right?
And those would be us. Okay.
The bourgeoisie has, through its exploitation of the world market, given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country.
So, okay, he's kind of saying this, and people complain about this.
So, let's say McDonald's.
I know we didn't, right? So, McDonald's goes everywhere, and people say, well, when everyone starts eating McDonald's, they get the same advertisements, they get the same food, and everyone ends up kind of the same.
And your local cooking, your local flavors, your local spices, and everyone ends up kind of the same.
Yeah. But to me, it's like if people like McDonald's, assuming they don't eat too much because it's not that healthy for you if you eat too much, although you can get good salads and stuff there.
Well, I mean, the Filet-O-Fish isn't too bad, I guess.
Yeah, not too bad. And what happened yesterday with your Filet-O-Fish?
I loved it. You opened it and you said...
Oh my gosh, it looks like the picture for once in our life.
That's what I was thinking. Well, the action doesn't look too different.
And then I looked at the photo and it had the same type.
I bet you it was just freshly made because we had to wait for it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so it had to be freshly made and it wasn't one of these, oh, we saw this.
Okay, fine, I'm telling you.
I don't care what you say, Dad, I'm telling.
So there was this video online and it showed a picture of this burger with some...
With cheese and ketchup and a bit of lettuce and it was super great.
And they gave you this half thing that was half fallen apart in a bag and there was sauce everywhere and it was just like depressing.
There was like one piece of crumbled up cheese and the burger thing looked like burnt and it was like...
If there was one word for depressing, yeah, it was depressing.
I did a tweet the other day. There's this guy running for the Democrat presidential candidacy.
His name is Bloomberg. And he's crazy rich.
And he spent hundreds of millions of dollars on ads.
And then people finally saw him in a debate.
And he didn't do that well.
And so I did a picture of Burger before, like the ad for the Burger and the real Burger.
And I said, Bloomberg. Anyway, so.
Oh my God. Yeah, it's kind of funny, right?
It's going to be coming to a meme.
Like the egg meme. Like the egg meme, right?
I don't know why I said that. We were like, yeah.
Eggabame. Yeah. To the great chagrin or upset of reactionists.
Now what the heck is he talking about with regards to reactionists here?
I just want to make sure that I understand.
What is a reactionist?
Let's find out. She whines.
Okay. All right.
Reactionists. Let's see what he's got to say here about reactionists.
In political science, a reactionary can be defined as a person holding political views that favor a return to a previous political state of society.
What does that mean? Oh, so he wants to go back to the Middle Ages.
Oh, okay. He wants to go back to the past, right?
I don't approve. I don't approve.
Certainly couldn't be doing this show in the Middle Ages, right?
Okay. We'd just be talking in a bedroom.
It is drawn from under the feet of industry, the national ground on which it stood.
I don't know what that means exactly, other than, oh, maybe he means like the relationships between the lords and the serfs who work to the land.
Now the serfs go and work in cities in the factories because they can make more money that way.
Yeah. All old established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed.
They are dislodged by the new industries whose introduction becomes a life-and-death question for all civilized nations by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones.
Okay, so what this means is you can order marble for your kitchen that comes from Italy.
Right? I mean, we ate yesterday a mango after dinner.
That didn't come from anywhere around here because you can't.
Coconuts, bananas, all these things, right?
I'm warning you. Mango seeds are like the size of my hand.
They're really huge, right? Yes.
I thought you were like, oh, I don't know, maybe the size of a toonie.
Yeah, yeah. You're like medium and I'm like, this is medium.
Because you can get big fruit from small seeds.
Look at watermelons. Tiny seeds, big fruit, right?
Huge seeds. I mean, sorry, tiny, huge fruit, tiny seeds.
Industries whose products are consumed not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe.
In place of the old wants satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climates.
So, here's an example, right?
You can't grow tea in England.
But boy, do the English people love their tea.
Oh, you want a cup of tea?
It's tea, tea, tea all the time.
In fact, I talked about this in my wonderful documentary, Hong Kong, Fight for Freedom, which you can get at fdrurl.com forward slash Hong Kong.
That 10% of the British government's income came from taxes on tea.
That's how much they loved it.
And so he was saying, well, look, when you were in England, before you had tea, you didn't even miss it.
Because you never knew it, right?
But now you have tea, you're completely addicted to tea, and you've got to bring it all the way in from India or other places, right?
Okay, so what? Yeah.
So there's some new thing that you really like, and what's wrong with that?
Well, like songs. Some songs I like for a month, and then I get bored of them, and then some other songs I'll like for precisely two days, and then I'll hate them.
In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations.
So he's basically saying that nations that trade together become kind of tied together.
Products stop crossing the borders of a country eventually soldiers will start crossing the borders of a country in other words Countries that are tied together through trade almost never go to war because they're too dependent on each other Yeah, so so that's kind of important But here's the funny thing is that this guy is writing a book Right?
In the middle of the 19th century, hundreds of years after the invention of the printing press.
And he's using the printing press, which he says is a bad thing because it changed things in the past.
He's using the printing press to spread all of these ideas about how change is bad.
But the printing press only exists because of the change he thinks is bad.
Anyway, it's kind of crazy. And he says, as in material, so also in intellectual production.
So things that you create which are thought things.
Like this podcast or a book or something like that.
The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property.
National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible.
And from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.
Right. So you could read a book by a guy written in India, and that's going to give you a different view of the world than a book written by a guy who lives down the street.
You're going to read books written by other religions, by other races, by other cultures, by other countries.
Yeah. What's wrong with that?
Nothing. Nothing wrong with that, right?
I like that kind of stuff.
I remember we saw a...
A preview for a movie called The Parasite, which was all subtitles.
I think it won an Oscar or something.
It's like, yeah, I'd love to watch that stuff.
I think I watched a movie about...
It was set in Communist China, and it was something about a red balloon, but nothing to do with the clown movie.
But yeah, it was really, really...
It had a big effect on me, and I'm glad to be able to see that movie.
I'm sure it actually had everything to do with it.
I'm not kidding. I'm not kidding. He said, What is a barbarian nation?
So barbarian...
So the word's actually kind of funny, right?
So the Roman Empire, which started in Italy and spread really huge across the world, when it came to Germany and the northern parts of England, like they built a whole wall to keep what they called the barbarians out.
And they were pretty primitive people.
And they had a pretty simple language.
And the Romans...
Like, you know how we say, oh, blah, blah, blah.
Oh yeah. So give me an example of when you might say, blah, blah, blah.
Oh, when your mom is nagging me about something, blah, blah, blah.
It's just a joke. Right.
So when the Romans heard the barbarian language, the language of these primitive tribes, they said, you know what it sounds like to me?
Bah, bah, bah, bah, bah.
Right? So then they called them barbarians.
It's so funny, right? It'd be like calling someone the blah, blah, rians.
You're never allowed to call your parents the Blablarians.
You're a Blablarian! Wait, you're hurting my pee-pees.
Aw, I'm sorry. Did I hurt your feet?
Yeah, by the way, he made a huge mistake telling me about that.
I really should never have told you that. Why did you do this to yourself?
So he's saying, well, look, they're drawing even the most primitive nations into civilization, but somehow they're the bad guys.
He said the cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls.
So it's basically saying you can get stuff, capitalists deliver stuff really cheap, and that means local industry kind of falls apart, right?
Yeah. With which it forces the barbarians intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate.
So it's like, well, we hate these foreigners, but man, they've got cheap sugar.
Yeah. So we'll let them in, right?
Okay, well, that's good. It means that we're juicing hatred, bringing people into civilization.
How is that bad? He says it compels all nations on pain of extinction to adopt the bourgeois mode of production.
In other words, if you resist free trade, and this is really, really interesting to me.
Yeah. So, England is this tiny, tiny island that ended up ruling a third of the world.
There was an old saying that says, the sun never sets on the British Empire, because somewhere that England owns, it's always daylight, even though it's nighttime in England.
Now, one of the reasons it was able to do that, and the main reason, was that it started free trade, became incredibly wealthy, was able to fund this giant navy that went all over the world, and they actually ended slavery, not just in the British Empire, but all over the world.
Whenever they found a slave ship...
They would imprison the slavers, the people who owned the slaves and were sailing the ship, and they would free all the slaves.
It was a really amazing, wonderful thing that the British Empire did.
And so he's saying, look, if you don't allow free trade in your country, then all the other countries that do have free trade become so wealthy that they can dominate you.
And it's like, yeah, okay, so freedom brings wealth.
It really does. It compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, to become bourgeois themselves.
It creates a world after its own image.
Right, so free trade spreads.
That's the way it works, right?
And just over the last couple of decades, billions of people have come out of poverty.
Do you know what they call poverty?
How many dollars a day do you think you have to make to not be considered extremely poor in the world?
Four years? It's crazy.
It's $1.90. U.S. So like $2.50 Canadian or something like that, right?
That's literally insane.
But you know, billions of people around the world made less than a couple of dollars a day.
And half of those have been rescued from poverty just in the last couple of years.
It's incredible. And that's because of free trade.
Alright, so last page.
Wait, what percentage?
Let's not talk. We're 15%.
Oh wow, that's the most we've gotten.
We were at 8% before?
Something like 7, yeah. The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns.
It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural.
Which urban? Urban city, rural as country.
And has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.
So, generally, it's not...
For most of the people working without machinery on a farm, it's kind of a dumb life.
It doesn't mean that they're dumb.
It just means that you don't need a lot of skill to plant stuff, right?
And to harvest stuff. It takes a bit of skill to have the plant to grow.
For sure, but that skill is usually handed...
Like me. Yeah, but the knowledge is usually kind of handed down to you from your forefathers and all that, or your foremothers or whatever, right?
Yeah. So, but if you go into the city and you have to work a complicated machine and you have to work with other people and you have to, like, it's more complicated.
So he's saying, great, you know, they've rescued people from the dumbness of rural life.
Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarians and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilized ones.
Nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the east on the west.
So I don't see how this is much of an insult.
So he's saying basically when free trade takes over land, in other words, when the people who make the most use of the land end up with the most land, produce the most food, then you end up with cities.
And then the country is dependent on the cities because the cities make stuff that the country people buy.
And the cities are dependent on the country because they need the food.
Okay, like I don't know why that's so bad.
It's good. I mean, because he was dependent upon a guy who owned a factory to pay his bills.
So he says, the bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production, and of property.
I don't know what that means.
So scattered state of the population is, so in the past, most of the little counties, little areas, were self-sufficient.
In other words, they grew their own food.
They had their own little doctor.
They might have had a lawyer or two in case people got disputes and so on.
So they were self-sufficient. And now he's saying, because of free trade, if we want bananas, we're dependent upon South America or Central America where they grow bananas.
But what's the alternative?
We don't get bananas. We can live without bananas.
I mean, I like bananas.
The bourgeois is not getting away with property because free trade requires that you have property rights.
It is agglomerated production and is concentrated property in a few hands.
Okay, agglomerated. That's a word I haven't heard for a while.
I think it means combined or put together.
Collect a form into a mass or group.
Yeah, okay. Chains of stores and so on, right?
It is agglomerated production.
It's concentrated property in a few hands.
Well, I don't think that's true because when you think about it in the past, the lords owned the land and the peasants had to work on them and kind of half slaves of the lords.
That's what being a serf is. So how does it, more so than the Middle Ages, how on earth is property concentrated in a few hands?
Yeah. The necessary consequence of this was political centralization.
Independent or but loosely connected provinces with separate interests, laws, governments and systems of taxation became lumped together into one nation with one government, one code of laws, one national class interest, one frontier and one customs tariffs.
Yeah, okay, so that makes sense. So, you know, in Canada, there are provinces, there are counties, there are towns, all these little subdivisions, right?
Yeah. Now, can you imagine if there were different tax rates in every county?
Oh, my God. It would be impossible to do business.
Oh, yeah. I mean, if you wanted to drive, let's say there were tariffs that you had to drive between one county and another.
You had to stop and pay a tariff and stop and pay a tariff, and each tariff was different.
You had to have cash. Like, it would just be impossible.
So he's saying that when you get free trade, you tend to get rid of these local crazy little regulations and differences between stuff.
And this is still kind of the case, right?
So if you're a lawyer and you are licensed to practice in Ontario or if you go to America, you can't practice law because their laws are different, right?
But you try to make things as simple as possible and as few barriers as possible.
He's saying this is somehow a bad thing.
He says the bourgeoisie during its rule of scarcely 100 years has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than of all preceding generations together.
Yeah, okay.
So he's saying they're really, really productive.
They really create a lot of cool stuff.
Subjection of nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, putting canals in rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground.
What earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?
Now, this is kind of poetic.
It's good writing. Like, it really, I mean, I know it's a little tough to follow the language, but he's saying, subjection of nature's forces to man.
So there's an old saying that says, nature to be commanded must be obeyed.
Like if you want to control nature, you have to obey the laws of nature.
Like if you want to build a bridge, which is kind of controlling, you can walk over the water, so to speak, by building a bridge.
If you want to control nature and be able to walk over water, you have to obey nature.
Like you can't build a bridge as if there's only half the gravity that there is.
So you have to obey nature's laws in order to control nature.
Application of chemistry to industry and agriculture?
Yeah. So they found wonderful ways to grow new crops, right?
Because the big problem with crops is bugs and birds.
Yeah. We don't have to worry about that stuff inside the house.
But bugs and birds, that's why there are scarecrows, right?
Yeah, and why now there are like...
They put chemicals to keep the bugs off the plants, right?
Poor berries. They get way too many chemicals and now we never eat them.
But it's okay. We'll find organic stuff.
Sorry, off topic. Steam navigation.
So, steamships and all that.
Railways. Electric telegraphs.
Now, that's where you do...
And you can send messages.
They didn't have voice until like the early 20th century.
But you could send messages with what's called Morse code and all that.
Clearing of whole continents for cultivation.
What does that mean? So...
The difference between a lawn and a forest is the difference where you cultivate stuff.
Or, you know, when we drive past a farm, maybe you have one or two trees in the field, but most of it is just flat or it's planted with corn or wheat or something like that.
Well, like the farm location, we'll see these strips of trees.
I don't know if that indicates, oh, there's another farm here, there's another farm here or something.
And he's saying, so a canal is an artificial river that's put in there perfectly straight.
And they actually have ways of dealing, because rivers, there's a waterfall, right?
You can't send a ship down a waterfall.
So they have these ways of raising and lowering ships where the height of the river is different, right?
And you have a canal.
There's a famous canal called the Panama Canal.
Like, you know how there's like North America, then it gets really skinny in the middle, and then there's South America?
Yes.
So they created this because normally you'd have to go all the way around the south of America to go from the west of America to...
You can't go through the north because it's the Arctic Circle and you can't get through it, right?
So you'd have to sail all the way down to the bottom of South America and all the way back up.
It would take like weeks and weeks and weeks, right?
So what they did was they dug a huge canal that goes through right the middle.
So you can sail down, go through the canal and go back up.
That's helpful. Yeah, very helpful.
Whole populations conjured out of the ground.
So what he's saying is because food became so much more productive, people got to live rather than die.
Whole populations conjured out of the ground.
It's a beautiful way to say how amazing agriculture is.
What earlier century had even a guess that such amazing productive forces were asleep in society?
I mean, it's a beautiful way of putting it.
And I still...
It's got this love-hate relationship.
Yeah, it's weird. I had that with a guy I worked with once.
Before you were born, I worked with a guy.
Man, he just thought I was the best guy ever.
He bought me books.
He and I would go for lunch.
And he thought I was the greatest thing since sliced bread.
It's kind of an old phrase, right? But then when I questioned or opposed some decisions he was making in business, which to me is part of what you have to do when you're one of the bosses, Boy did he ever get He just got so mad at me.
He hated me. I was like the worst guy ever.
And this love-hate relationship that goes on, it's like he really worships and loves the bourgeoisie and also thinks that they're the worst people ever.
And that's actually kind of a sign that you're mentally ill to me.
Like if you hate someone, you hate them because they're evil or bad or dangerous or whatever.
If you love someone because they're virtuous and good and helpful, but you can't hate and love the same person.
That just makes no sense to me. I think the only thing that you can hate and love is chocolate because it's terrible for you, but it's so good.
Well, here's the thing. No, it's terrible.
No, even that, even that is, there are some benefits to chocolate.
And if you don't have too much and you clean your teeth well, it doesn't have to be the worst.
Particularly the human evil known as dark chocolate.
Oh, wait, no, I just did that again, didn't I? But yeah, so I know what you mean.
What do you mean? No, I just said you can't hate it and I called it evil.
You can't love and hate it. But I don't really like dark chocolate.
Oh, he's evil.
Look at it. No, so, but that's a thing, right?
And that's called ambivalence, where you have strong feelings of, like, exercise.
I'm ambivalent, right? I don't enjoy it, but I know it's good for me, so I'll do it, right?
I hate exercise, and that's the end of that.
Yeah. So, but we're going to go and exercise this afternoon.
No! Yeah, we will.
No, but to love and hate, like to say, oh, look at all these wonderful people.
They've transformed the world.
There's millions of people alive because of them.
They've produced amazing things.
They've, you know, broken down barriers.
And they're the worst human beings on the planet.
It's like, if you hate the bourgeoisie, don't you also hate the millions of people that are alive because they've been so good at making food and growing food and shipping food and all that?
Anyway, so we'll get on to this next time.
And it's really a fascinating book.
Percentage? We are at 16%.
So, yeah.
Really, really cool stuff. Thanks everyone for listening.
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