All Episodes
Previous Next
Nov. 29, 2024 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
05:32
The Poor and Marxism
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Now, the word poor here is all capitalized.
So, the story goes on.
The poor were ghosts treading the uneasy halls of speculation.
Speculation to me, spec is part of spectacles, which is to work, right?
But speculation here has two meanings.
One is to simply...
Wanderer about the world to think about the world in a conceptual form.
But speculation is also investment.
To be a speculator is to invest and look for returns, right?
There were ghosts treading the uneasy halls of speculation.
So whenever you grow the economy, the poor are left behind.
And all rich, famous, and powerful people fear two things.
The combination of two things.
Politicians and the mob.
Politicians and the mob.
The story goes on.
The poor were invoked in many an erudite speech, as if there existed a vast group of humanity with no existence, save four letters and two legs.
Poor, four letters and two legs.
What is to be done?
was asked in profound boudoirs and sun-washed parlor rooms.
What is to be done?
was asked by tender ancient souls and bitter young minds.
Tender ancient souls is the pathological altruism, usually the elderly female.
Bitter young minds is the resentment of the socialists.
Story continues.
What is to be done?
was asked by those who breathed sherry fumes and those who renounced them in blind protest.
What is to be done?
was the central question of the age.
But it was an interrogation that could not be answered through the blinkered habits of the questioners.
A new age, or none at all.
It seemed the only possible answer.
The new age is rising tide lifts all boats, none at all is we stay in medieval squalor.
So one of the reasons why Marxism caught the imagination of the world was because formerly the poor died in Out of sight in the countryside, but then when you had the urban proletariat, then people who were poor would be everywhere.
And of course, you know, the women who had slept with the wrong guy, got pregnant, couldn't get married, who fell into prostitution, and drug addicts and alcoholics, you see them and it's like, it sears your brain.
So...
The story continues.
This is the approach of the poor to the groaning tables aplenty.
When they came on the morning of that clear day, it seemed as if the earth had opened wide and spat out its most bitter seeds.
Seeds ratched forth for their failure to bloom.
The trails of these seeds, these poor, were littered with unnameable losses, as if they cursed their movements by dropping all limbs that might propel them.
Here a man rises from drinking and stumbles out into the street.
He tries to scratch his brow, but raises his stump in vain, for his hands have remained clinging to the bottle.
There a woman rises from a thickly companioned bed and tries to walk, but falls to the floor.
Her legs have remained between the covers, the mobility they offered, amputated by the growing seed in her belly.
Here a child arises from the wreckage of a sunken family, tries to grasp at the light he projects before him, but his eyes are gone.
Sold for respite from horror and memory, he gropes alone in the dark.
So many limbs!
It should surprise the world to cross the street without tripping, without falling, and regarding the right angles of human destruction, through the corner of a propped elbow, all avenues of escape, all stripped from the hapless paw like the uniform of a cowardly soldier, stripped by the sergeant of choice and circumstance.
His sword finds the seam, binding Hote—oh, sorry— His sword finds the seam binding hope to effort, and rip!
They fly apart to be lost on the empty battlefield.
The sergeant spits and says, No salute, boy!
You are a disgrace to your uniform!
And what are the medals of labor, hope, and expectation?
Off with them!
Throw them on the ground!
Grind them to dust!
This was a war fought long before your time.
Your father's father ran from the battlefield.
These medals do not belong to you!
This cap?
What is this cap?
Do I finger an inscription marked ambition?
Ambition for what?
Woman, do you wish to become a queen?
You are the daughter of a gambler, a thief, a drunkard, a poor man.
No!
No!
You shall walk bareheaded and fall by the road under a hard sun.
Your hair shall fly on your face when the winds of adversity strike, and your flesh shall chill on your bones, for you have been part of the darkness at the corner of men's eyes.
And if they see you, they shall see your trail, see where you came from, and shall be blind no longer.
Compassion, girl, have compassion for those a little less fortunate than you.
And whether the haughty sergeant who hacked at the ranks of life was appointed by God, by society, or by the poor themselves, was of little consequence to the age.
The effect was clear.
Four letters, two legs, and entirely too much of the whole business.
Something should be done.
But what?
An interesting question, very complex.
Compassion, yes.
▲
Export Selection