反共產 Critique of The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx, Ep. 1

chapter one page one opens with some
jargon that might be a little bit difficult for a 21st century reader to understand but the image being evoked would have been immediately meaningful to the readers alive when this was first published during Cole Marx's own lifetime opens with the words the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle Freeman and slave patrician and plebeian and plebeian what does class struggle mean I think it's very difficult for people now in the year 2019 to understand the intensity and the gravity that the study of Latin brought to Europe in the late 18th century and then throughout the whole of the nineteenth century why is the city of Cincinnati called Cincinnati look into it you know the the men who fought in the American Revolution and established United States of America they studied intensely and really responded to even the kind of smallest details of the political history of Athens and Rome and some of them were more interested in the social model offered by Athens and some who more interested in Rome likewise in reading the history of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic period following after it this intense profound obsession with classical learning ancient Greece and Rome and it's much more than symbolic and what they learned from the study of that history it led to for example Karl Marx's theory of class struggle all right now class struggle today 2019 people might think of a gay pride parade you know they might think of public demonstrations with flags and songs and you know maybe there's some police brutality maybe there's some tension maybe there's some news coverage with nasty words being spoken back and forth nobody reading this in 2019 has evoked in their mind's eye the image of what those struggles really were between patrician and plebeian freedmen and slaves so I don't mean to insult you in the audience but I'm gonna make a follow-up video to this where I give you block quotations of just how brutal class war was just how unbelievably sanguine class struggle really was in ancient Greece in Rome and it's not just that we today have documentary evidence of what it was like when the plebs and the patricians were at war with each other in the in the streets of ancient Rome those accounts were being read by Karl Marx and all of his contemporaries they knew they they knew these specific descriptions of fighting in the streets of the rich against the poor above class interest dividing Roman society and they read about you know the murder of you know innocent little babies people being starved and burned alive on fire unbelievably brutal struggles for who is to control the destiny of Rome and various city-states in Greece we don't just have records from from Athens that way those accounts those descriptions they're they're really moving and they'll give you nightmares and they really did directly inspire the class analysis of society that we that we find in Karl Marx in some ways it's become more difficult for people to understand because so few of the people reading Marx have actually read a for example Aristotle although Aristotle is not our only witness to that history now why was ancient Rome so susceptible to class analysis why was ancient Rome so susceptible to this view that society is divided into distinct class interests and the class each class in society pursues its own interest and then I could repeat all of that with ancient Athens well both Athens and Rome were formally and explicitly divided into social classes broadly speaking Rome and all of the Greek city-states there were many there were many significantly it wasn't just Athens but broadly speaking something that had in common was the attempt to positively motivate the payment of taxation by allowing you to participate in government in a different social class depending on how much you paid in taxes so I am generalizing here you can read Aristotle and read about specific city-states and how they how they organized these taxes but stereotypically an ancient Greek or ancient Italian city-state would say something like well if you really want to participate in government if you really want to have all the rights of a citizen it's a loaded term unfortunately if you want to be kind of a first-class citizen then you have to pay enough in taxation to provide the government with two heavily armed soldiers all right now it differs from city states they say there's one city-state that specific I read about where the action tax requirement to be a kind of first class citizen was was really low but in others it might be very significant what it's like well you know you need to be able to provide us with one horse and one fully armed soldier and when they're going through the documentary evidence it also seems that in some city-states it was more literally that you had to provide like a sword and a shield and a suit of armor and in some it was well you just have to pay a certain amount of money in taxes each year that would be enough money to buy a suit of armor something like this so you can imagine in the ancient world one of the reasons why this mode of organization was so important was that there was there was no surveillance state there was no way for them to check your bank accounts or track your credit card the ability of the state to negatively enforce taxation the ability of the state to motivate you to pay your taxes because of the threat of punishment if you do not that was that was very weak but if you have a state set up where you say okay well there's a special dining hall over here and you can only eat in that dining hall if you've paid taxes over a certain amount to support the war effort or to support keeping an army even during peacetime those sorts of things really positively motivated conformity and public political participation so Athens in Rome and it changes from one period to the next - we have evidence over many centuries it changes from city to city and it changes historically as time goes by but broadly speaking you tended to have a very acute awareness of for instance who was in the top one-fifth of the income distribution of society who was in the second fifth who was in the third fifth in many of these societies they literally had named groups like this for different social classes by quintile or by quartile they would assign you to a tribe although it's not tribe in our sense of the word today based on your income and what part of the city you set in and then you might have representation at participating government on that basis you'd also participate in the military in a different way depending on your social class and your sons would have a different status in the military depending on your social class also based on your neighborhood and your tribe and this actually created incredibly tight bonds with society this is part of why there was so much pride taken in serving in the military people would serve in the military and they would dine with and go to war with familiar faces that they knew that wouldn't be serving with strangers because they would serve with the same people whom they saw in these kind of village councils these various semi democratic forms of representational government they that they participate in and many of those also involve just eating meals together and this kind of thing so um yes ancient Rome and ancient Athens you can read some kind of blood-curdling descriptions some horrifying descriptions of what those societies were like when the relationships between classes broke down when the patricians were at war with the plebs and that did happen again and again it's a colorful history however it's incredibly misleading to look back at the history of ancient Roman ancient Athens as if they were perpetually and only in a state of class warfare as if for example there was no class mobility as if in Athens it was impossible to be born in the poorer quintile and work your way up to a to a more wealthy social stratum and so on not just issues of social mobility but also just friendship and intermarriage and so on that you know these people live together and work together and of course if they didn't their society you know would have collapsed so yeah again it's easy to kind of remember Rome entirely in terms of its civil wars it's easy andaman genuinely I mean Marx was appealing to a readership who knew that history who'd read those evocative passages it was easy for Marx to appeal to his audience's imagination with this notion of class struggle because they knew what it meant to talk about the Wars of patricians versus plebeians and it's much more difficult to explain what the advantages were of that society how the social class is actually most of the time lived together in harmony work together in harmony and had a somewhat democratic system of representative and participatory government even wrong I mean I regard Rome as much less democratic than ancient Athens was but nevertheless the type of representation and participation that that people had in government that really mattered to people and it really motivated them to pay their taxes oh all government Authority ultimately rests on your ability to collect taxes and then spend it on the public's behalf so with that Edmund said when you're looking at the start of this text and you're looking at the end of this text the overall structure and ideological function of the argument that Karl Marx presents here is to pose a problem and then exaggerate how terrible the problem ends so that the reader loses interest in any particular solution so here we're talking about chapter one part one the beginning of the text the first installment the analysis of Congress manifesto by Karl Marx but toward the end of the text Mark's just ridicules any notion of a utopian model of what the future should be right so you've read the text before you may Phegley recall this and keep in mind someone during Marx's lifetime sitting down to study this text they could reasonably expect Marx to to present us with a utopian model of the future and Marx might even be expected to you know give us some kind of plausible explanation for why it is that his method his approach is the way to get from our present society to that future utopia why it is that he understands better than some other utopian philosopher both the problems in our society and the solutions what should be done directed by and Marx instead he kind of upsets the apple cart he challenges the reader he overthrows that expedition Joe and he just ridicules the whole history of prior communists people who were called communists and sona's called themselves commies he says oh no no all these communists in the past with their utopian thinking they're no better than Christian fundamentalists they're no better than you know religious revolutionaries who promised heaven on earth who promised you know the kingdom of God on earth these these crazy utopian visions you know we're not like that Marx is presenting himself as some kind of hard-nosed materialist down-to-earth revolutionary who laughs at who scoffs at all notions of utopia he's not giving you a model of a better future at all no he's just presenting you with how terrible the society are in is the society you are presently in is presented as unbelievably terrible he presents the working class specifically the industrial proletariat to specifically factory workers he presents as just being chosen by history to be the solution to that problem and then he says get out and make revolution so he's calling for violence here and now specifically class struggle class war specifically the type of class struggle that you see in patrician against plebeian again these are evocative images from ancient Rome to some extent else from ancient Greece that the readers would have known he's calling for that kind of violence on the streets now and he's calling for it in the absence of any utopia in the absence of amenity promises made the reader such as all those other authors in May he named specific authors as examples that were supposed to laugh at as being terribly misguided so that is the structure and ideological function of the text so chapter one opens first with a sort of praise of the bourgeoisie he states all the amazing accomplishments of the middle class in transforming the world bringing about the demolition of the old feudal society of the Dark Ages now almost nobody would bother to criticize this but it should be pointed out this is basically fiction we then have a turning point when the fiction becomes quite a bit more difficult to bear where he switches from naming all of the accomplishments and virtues of the bourgeois class to describing the bourgeois class as the vampires of our society so I'll read a paragraph here from the turning point of the text this is where he's just getting into his condemnation of the bourgeoisie and bourgeois society society as it's been recreated under Porsche well leadership the bourgeoisie wherever it has got the upper hand has put an end to all feudal patriarchal idyllic relations it has pitilessly he a torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his quote unquote natural superiors and is left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked his self-interest then callous cash payment it has drowned the most heavenly ecstasy's of religious fervor of chivalrous and enthusiasm of Philistine sentimentalism in the icy water of egotistical calculation it is resolved personal worth into exchange value and in place of the numberless and indefeasible charted freedoms has set up that single unconscionable freedom free trade in one word for exploitation veiled by religious and political religions naked shameless direct brutal exploitation now again in terms of the structure of the text the function of what he's doing here ideologically what's really important to keep in mind is he's not just making a case for the industrial proletariat being a special class that the the factory workers are a special group of people which you know not not totally preposterous um he's making the case that the industrial proletariat factory workers represent the best interests of our whole society that they are the ones who can and will destroy the bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie are so terrible that they deserve to be destroyed and that the world would be a better place when the factory workers do that this is not obvious I mean he'll when you think about it in terms of the burden of evidence the burden of proof what you'd have to do to convince me of that it's considerable um right now I may dislike the Government of Canada I do I dislike who's in power in Canada does that mean I imagine Canada would be better off if a bunch of potato farmers potato farmers from Prince Edward Island kicked all the bourgeois people out of government kicked out the middle class people and took over in a coup d'état led by potato farmers no I don't think that would be better if the government we've got is bad but how be even worse do I think the government be improved if a group of factory workers people who manufacture cars and a car factory no I don't believe that you'd have to convince me that that particular coup d'etat would somehow improve our society the other big deep change he's trying to bring about in his readers reception of the universe is the assumption that class interest is your only interest that class struggle is the only struggle now that is not just rhetoric the point is and he makes this at some length even in Chapter 1 here he says at some length that he thinks for the proletariat for the factory workers nationalism is dead party affiliation politics are dead that the factory workers somehow are so transformed by the horror of working in a factory something about being a factory were so transformed them that they no longer participate in national some of any kind no okay what a claim of course this has never been true and it's still not true today people can work in a factory and be conservative in Canada the vast majority of factory workers are the vast majority of blue-collar working-class people in Canada are conservative um you can work in a factory and be a nationalist people can work in a factory and intensely hate the French or hate the Spanish local rivalries within Europe and so on um yeah so it's quite a bit deeper than just stereotyping he's trying to create the illusion which again ultimately is inspired by and comes out of the study of ancient Greece and Rome it comes out of nothing else it does not come out of Hegel it does not come out of the study of the history of China or India all of which Karl Marx dabbled in the mature Marx is not derivative of Hegel look at Marx's youngest writings okay there's a little bit of influence he's imitating Hegel a little bit here and there it's nothing of the kind is going on here but the idea that class interest is your only interest and then you give up all fealty to particular Kings particular religions the idea that history of the industrial proletariat the idea that factory workers are nihilists that they've lost any sense of attachment to the Catholic Church or the Protestant Church it was completely untrue when Karl Marx is alive it's still completely untrue today so inviting the reader to imagine the industrial proletariat as a wrecking ball that is doomed and determined to smash into and destroy bourgeois society yes on the one hand we're supposed to imagine that because we are first told that the bourgeois class itself was a wrecking ball that destroyed the aristocracy that destroyed the Society of the Middle Ages or even of the of the Renaissance period and now of course that's also untrue and that's completely fictional it's a ridiculous reading of the history of Europe and it's also ridiculous reading in terms of the personalities and political motivations of who the bourgeois class are the bourgeois class have not in fact reduced everything to mere dollars and since the bourgeois class remained powerfully attached to nationalism religion various political interests of their of their time in place but the bourgeois class is interpret and presented here only in terms of their class interest and the the working class then likewise now again in ancient Greece in ancient Rome class interest was very highly mobilized because that was how their government worked that was how their form of public religion even worked and that was how their tax collection worked and the societies we live in both now and in Karl Marx's time the comparison to two ancient Greece and Rome is very weak and of course we also are not a slave Society so there are many significant differences I just mentioned there was time my life when I did a lot of research on history politics and Society of India one of the misconceptions of the history of India is that many many Europeans many Americans and Europeans when they read the history of India they assume that each caste within the caste system so a caste is similar to a social class I'm not gonna get into the differences but each each social class so to speak in India that they were naturally allied to the other members of their social class and enemies of the other social classes and what you have to understand working through documentary evidence and historical evidence that's really not true on the contrary the way social class is organized in India you'd have a situation where members of the same group all had the same profession and they were very much in competition with one another whereas by and large their allies and colleagues would be people from other social classes so even if it's just something as simple as you okay this is kind of a bad example all right you owned a factory in ancient India that bought up rice and sugar and transformed it into sugar candies like our jujubes you know mushed up rice and sugar you add some coloring and juice make new candy that's already attested in ancient India in the Pala canon and the ancient buddhist scriptures so guys candy candy making in India has been around for 3,000 years okay so that's a real ancient so there is actually a very powerful social tendency whereby the candy maker will be friends with the rice farmers and will be friends with whoever he buys sweetener from it's you know this ancient India so it's not gonna be sugar cane maybe will be sure for they're gonna get the the sugar and the endo and the rice from and so on those people they tend to be colleagues with whereas their rival candy makers even though they're members of the same caste that's a much more difficult situation so in the same way in Marx's time you know the assumption that middle-class businessmen that bourgeois businessman have a solidarity of business money that they don't regard one another as competition that they don't hate and divide one another and have you know sneering rivalries with one another or something or vendetta's against it one another that there isn't warfare within one class as opposed to warfare between social classes that's another profoundly false assumption and again it's it's maybe easier to be deceived with a sort of thing if you're thinking about a far-off distant romanticized foreign culture where there's a barrier of language and culture and so on within our own culture you know I think we all implicitly understand that that the owner of one a television network may really not feel a sense of class solidarity with the owner of another television network their comfort their competitors they may despise each other so on and so forth so there's there's really no reason to assume that class rivalry is between classes instead of within classes because there are many many problems that are implicit within the text but obvious to my eyes in 2019 okay so we then get a whole series of complaints about the bourgeoisie that are simply factually false firstly the boy were quote the bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production and thereby the relations of production and with them the whole of society nope just a false claim no you can have a Porsche or middle-class in an economically stagnant society if you were living through the Industrial Revolution maybe you would believe as Marx did that the Industrial Revolution was just gonna keep on revolutionising Society at the same pace but nope you know I mean we invented the toilet into an amazing extent the toilet and plumbing just didn't change we invented electricity yeah we do more creative things with electricity but I mean it's not the case that technological change and the transformation of society continued to be a via fundamental technologies like the toilet and plumbing and train tracks and trains to a shocking extent there was this early period of innovation where those things were new and then in many many ways for centuries they fundamentally didn't change so no I mean this is also kind of hilarious because we think about it Marx is presenting the bourgeoisie to the reader as if the bourgeoisie represent constant radical revolutionary change and we we don't regard in that way even if you're a left-wing or even if you're a socialist or communist you associate the bourgeoisie with status quo conservative values right with keeping things the same so there's a problem here no these claims the bourgeoisie they were bringing about this revolution and they're they're just gonna keep on doing it they're gonna keep on radically transforming the society with this unbelievable economic and technological progress nope you know we invented the stock exchange and you know adding computers to the stock exchange really didn't change it very much terms the fundamental function of the stock exchange the bank the way banking works the way the various elements of capitalist society work the way even elections work and democracy works it's shocking how little those things have changed after a brief period of innovation surrounding the Industrial Revolution okay so again one of the common delusions that communists and far left wingers have that I've made other videos talking about so number two he claims quote the need for a constantly expanding market for its product products chases the bourgeoisie everywhere all over the globe close quote the idea here that capitalism requires infant growth and constant growth it's just false you can have an economically stagnant society and that society will be better off with a capitalist free-market system than with a feudal system or with a communist centralized command economy so no and there are examples of countries like Japan that had long periods of economic stagnation or even economic contraction and capitalism worked just fine in the middle-class work just fine soon and so forth all right sorry there were more comments here about how you lose your sense of national self-interest because of this overweening class self-interest class antagonism I think I've already talked about that enough right then we the next big turning point in the text is when he tries to convince us that working in a factory is slavery here let's let's let's quote this quote modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarch of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist masses of laborers crowded into the factory are organized like soldiers as privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class I repeat slaves of the bourgeois class and of the bourgeois state they are daily and hourly enslaved by the Machine by the overlooker and above all by the individual bourgeois manufacture himself the more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim the more petty the more hateful and the more embittering it is so this is the idea I mean he flirts with this also in des Capital from a somewhat different angle that somehow working in a factory is the most terrible fate imaginable compared to interestingly the bucolic conditions he imagines for workers in a feudal pre-industrial pre capitalist society it's just false even today 2019 levels of Technology is it worse to be a small shop self-employed Baker or to work in large scale bread factory where you do shift work that you work for ten hours at a machine you know in a bread factory believe me I've looked into this I went to baking college and got kicked out or dropped out long story um well you know I studied to be a baker for a significant length of time at many of the baking factories you literally work just one machine at one station so you know you may just unload the dough mixer you may just use the machine that divides the dough into separate small buns and you do that again and again for eight hours and that's it then you clean the machine at the end of the day you wipe down the machine so you know your labor may be more repetitive and more regular and in a sense less creative but there's not a lot of creativity in baking anyway but the whole factory operates at a much higher level of productivity than the artisanal small shop Baker so everyone can get paid better everyone can get better benefits and of course you get to show up with absolutely no stress on your mind you work your hours you clock any clock out the life of an industrial worker again it's highly paid um it's rewarding and you don't have any of the worries of a small entrepreneur who owns his own bakery even if you don't in a bakery if you're just an independent working Baker well now you have no boss you have no clock you maybe don't work with enormous machines like an owners robotic you know that's the type of horrible situation he's describing huge steel machines that divide the buns for you okay the nave that'll wake up every day you've got to buy your own ingredients you've got to worry about how much you're buying how much you're making how much you're gonna sell it for now you're you are your own boss you're not oppressed by anybody there's a lot more stress and a lot more misery in your life you don't have a team of people working together you don't have these machines that improve your your efficiency it's a very tough job being an independent artisanal Baker in many ways is hell on earth compared to working in the factory now everyone knows this who lives in Detroit or something working in a car Factory is a good job the reason why people left behind literally left behind life on the farm in more fetal conditions to move to the city to work in factories was indeed that work in those factories offered them a better life and that is still true today of course there have been struggles there have been struggles you know especially about things like injury and employer and accountability when someone loses a finger in a machine but guess what working on the farm working in a more futile setting if you imagine if you imagine those problems were only in in factories you know you're wrong so know with all admin said this is perhaps more false today than it was during Marx's own time but this ultimately you know is relying on a very dishonest fable about how terrible factory work is rather than any kind of sincere problem-solving mentality and looking at hey what our factories how are they transformer Society and what should we do to improve conditions for workers which indeed is going to include all kinds of petty little laws including things like lawsuits so that employees can sue their employer if they lose a factory in a machine if they lose a finger working at a machine in a factory this kind of thing step by step those things really did transform the the lot of the industrial proletariat in Europe in America and around the world so this section I feel closes my last comment for this chapter of the book today it closes again by trying to proclaim the class interest takes over all of their interests and explains to us that the industrial proletariat are this so-called universal class now that they represent the interests of society as a hold of the new class to take over Society so in that's capital Marx's longer work you see the total delusion Marx has that the vast majority of people in society in the future are going to be employed in factories he's completely wrong in reality he was living through a period of time especially when he was in England he's at when he's in London England he's living through a brief period of time when an extraordinarily high percentage to population are employed in factories due to unnatural economic conditions traded by the British Empire long story Google around do you think in the city you live in right now whoever you are watching today do you think that even 15% of the population is employed in factories where you live it's very likely wherever you live in the world that even 15% of people are employed in factories but Marx had the delusion that the Industrial Workers the industrial proletariat factory workers specifically we're going to just take over all of society so to give an example from des Capital that illustrates this what he talks about all school children having factory jobs in the future that in the future school children were going to be able to achieve financial independence from their parents by going part-time to work in a factory and part-time to take their lessons in school later it's like there are not enough factory jobs to have this much child labour it's just ridiculous I mean it's like someone telling you in the future everyone's gonna be a medical doctor it's a highly specialized trade that influences just one part of society and it is a small minority of our society that's employed in factories and that's true even in China China right now is going through a brief boom period with of a huge amount of factory labor but you know a lot of the factories that are now in China are gonna close down and leave China some of them are going to move to Vietnam some of them we're gonna move to India so on and so forth some of them are gonna move to Africa that's already happened interestingly North Africa has a bunch of bunch of shoe factories recently relocated from China to Africa that can happen - okay but nevertheless worldwide and city-by-city marx is just completely factually wrong with his claim both numerically that the factory laborers are going to become this huge class representing the whole of society and feature study and he's also wrong qualitatively because if you actually believe in this view of society that people are our peoples minds are so completely taken over by class interest that they no longer care about nationalism or religion or any other sentimental political attachment if that's what you believe then necessarily all the other social classes are going to be the enemies of the industrial proletariat and the industrial proletariat were then and would mein really a kind of minor social class a minor political movement of no particular significance so it doesn't make sense on many different levels okay guys so close this video by just saying not for the first time this week the most important thing in philosophy is to have a helpful problem-solving attitude and why is that philosophy like politics is fundamentally about problem-solving I would go so far as to say philosophy is politics directed towards problems that one person tries to solve alone in isolation whereas in politics we take very much the same problem-solving tool kit but directed towards problems that we try to cap tackle in groups of people or in aggregate or large societies as a whole philosophy may be more privately reflective in character whereas politics is more publicly reflective in character but nevertheless these are problem-solving methods and Marx is wrong precisely in that he does not have a problem-solving attitude looking at history looking at politics looking at economics he instead uses this method of just trying to exaggerate the nature of the problem exacerbate dramatize the nature of the problem to the point where the reader is willing to make an ideological commitment to being part of the solution and he presents that solution as a violent class struggle