反共產 Class Struggle: the French Revolution (Not Hegel) Created Marxism. Ep. 2.

the way that philosophy is taught in
Western University classrooms gives tremendous emphasis to the connection between Karl Marx and Hegel so it's for that reason that I have a brief video here trying to bring that connection down to earth try to put it on a more reasonable footing or basis the problem with Hegel is not so much the legacy of textbooks he has left behind to us but the attitude with which people read and reinterpret them today so to give an example in the philosophy of history there's a really awkward and fumbling and peculiar justification of slavery you know okay Hegel died in 1831 we just double-check that yeah 1831 is it really such a big deal that he offered this series of bizarre philosophic excuses for slavery it is what it is what's bizarre and inexcusable is to hear modern Western academic philosophy lecturers who are themselves very often Marxist or left-wing giving abstruse bizarre rationalizations for why somehow this set of excuses for slavery is profoundly psychologically insightful or still true today or we shouldn't judge him by bla bla bla bla bla come on guys like the legacy of Tex Hegel left to us should not be taken seriously in that fashion and excuses should not be made for them if you read what Hegel says about India if you read what Hegel says about China it is absolute garbage even and especially compared to the brilliant research that was published during his lifetime and that was published in German he was alive during a time when German awareness of Asia of Asian Studies of Asian languages of Sanskrit and Hinduism in India was blossoming there were amazing breakthroughs in European research those languages and those historical traditions happening and then you come to Hegel's philosophy of history and what he has to say about India and China and dude it is laughably stupid its this is just some know-nothing bumpkin who somehow got himself a professorship of philosophy passing judgment and making erudite sound engrossed generalizations that even in their own time were laughably stupid and laughably ignorant and give one other illustration of what his attitude was early in philosophy of history the same book by Hegel he makes the pronouncement that he feels that all of humanity should be united by the one religion that is most ancient and most original to mankind and and most universal some his claim is that this is Christianity and that its Lutheranism he was a Lutheran but in some sense the original and most ancient religion that's going to unite all of mankind is his Christianity maybe it's an idealized version of Lutheranism he has in mind like maybe it's not the Lutheran Church as in Germany yeah now again at that time it was way past a proven fact that there were religions in India and religions in Central Asia that were much more ancient than Christianity which he knew about a religion like Buddhism and Hinduism and so on but even leaving that aside within his time the state of you know classical scholarship within the Bible and with ancient texts connected to and contrasted the Bible there's a lot of evidence even within Christian scripture of what the pre-christian proto Jew Judaism and earlier Judaism first temple Judaism you really can get a pretty good sense of the history of religion even within that that kind of judeo-christian scholarship that again at that time was blossoming and sophisticated and he a goal remains this kind of totally uninitiated idiotic bumpkin outsider to the progress of what's really going on in philosophy theology even archeology whether it's Asian Studies or within or what-have-you and he's passing this hottie judgment on the history of civilization from his professors chair in these peculiar lectures for for teenagers well it is what it is it's a relic of that time in that culture but what he has to say about the history of China of the history of India it cannot be taken any more seriously than what he had to say about the motion of planets around the Sun which by the way he was hilariously wrong about also so you know um I've kind of loosen up about this in what ways there was a time when I would have made a video like this wanting to really harshly condemn Hagel as one of the worst authors and worst philosophers in the history of the world but the problem really is with our generation and how we regard him there's something very similar I would say with Immanuel Kant and in some ways the problem is similar with with Karl Marx so what is the bridge from Hegel to Karl Marx supposed to be it comes down to this same text I've already mentioned repeatedly Hegel's philosophy of history he has some remarks in there about the concept of an historical class and of a universal class in history and if you've read a little bit of Marx or you saw my earlier video bookmarks you know that Marx uses similar terms when talking about the industrial working class becoming a universal class or becoming the leading class in history this kind of idea so there's a similarity on the surface there now I'm not really talking about the young Marx there's probably an argue to mate if you go back to the earliest available writings in Marx that there's some more influenced or Hegel that can be talked about I still don't think it's it's terribly profound but we're talking about basically the mature adult Marx Marx's idea of social class is much more powerfully connected to the study of antiquity classical scholarship in ancient Rome and ancient Athens and then it's also powerfully influenced by the research that was coming back from the British Empire in India okay never forget European Europe imperialism in India predates European imperialism in North America now not by a longshot but in 1492 there already were Portuguese colonies in India you had the beginning of this incredibly brutal cycle of piece-by-piece India coming under European domination in detail and of course India the history of India held up a fascinating mirror to the history of Europe and India was discussed it was mentioned in ancient Greek in ancient Roman texts there was some awareness of India in antiquity so now Europe was kind of rediscovering India and was rediscovering an era when they were less less Christian that they didn't have to just understand India in terms of you know demon worship or something not in terms of a strictly Dark Ages view of India and of course they start to appreciate that India didn't really have a slave system as Europeans did at that time European was it your Europe was becoming a globe spanning slave trading empire as you may know um but they had this caste system that a system of social classes so call Marx as a mature writer he's influenced by the study of ancient Greece and Rome and then he's influenced by his fascination he had a really deep fascination with everything he could get his hands on describing the social class system in India that was being discovered and analyzed by the British partly because the British were conquering bits and pieces of India and never forget the British were in complex power sharing arrangements and alliances than India also it wasn't the case that the British just wiped India clean or something you know principality by principality the British had to make accommodations with you know including local mercenaries who fought for the British and local royal families that said okay we'll support the British you fight against the province next door to us these kinds of petty local rival rivalries were very much part of the British divide and rule strategy it wasn't the case that England ever just conquered India as a continent on the whole it controlled a patch war of smaller states comprising the grander enterprise of the the colonization of India all right so that African said Karl Marx is a guy influenced by all of those things as a mature author much more than influenced by Hegel's theory of social class of historical class of quote unquote universal classes so what was it Hegel said and what's what's the contrast that matters here well what Hegel really says is less about history than it is about the writing of history is what he says is at different periods of time there's a different class that is the historical class that is the only class history is written about so you have long periods of aristocracy where the historical records the books are just about the aristocrats you have periods of society where one man dominates society so much one ruler one monarch that the history is really just written about that one man and his family whether he's a king or a tyrant or what-have-you and you know of course the contrast in everyone's mind including Hegel's mine is the legacy of ancient Greek writing writing from you know Athens and to a lesser extent Rome where you really have this participatory and somewhat democratic form of government where the political class being written about really involves decision-making and participation and debate that you know a much larger part of society participated in not the slaves as you know women had a limited participation and so on but of course that was a striking contrast to the way history was written in aristocrat a period someone now am I suggesting to you that Hegel writes about this in a down-to-earth reasonable way no Hegel is a very pretentious over-the-top bombastic writer and sure he makes it sound as if he's stating something transcendental and profound and metaphysical so on and so forth and it's it's really not is really nothing of the kind there be debated or discussed what it comes down to is when he's talking about in different periods of history different social classes are the universal class or the historical class that would dominate society there's no further to go with his observation because it's fundamentally about the writing of history the recollection of history it's not about what actually unfolds historically I mean he's not claiming that the soldiers in the army didn't matter that only the commander mattered obviously that would be an absurdity it's not even a claim that in that sense the slaves don't matter or the lowest and most oppressed people in society so you know is that really what's important to crawl Marx when Marx develops this notion comes out of very very strongly out of Rome and Athens that it from Marxist perspective at different periods of time different social classes compete to take over the control of the government and his feeling is that with different quote-unquote modes of production with different economic be seized for their supremacy one period of history after another naturally tends to one form of government after another under the Dominion of one social class or another and you could say his gambit his prediction his you know his theory really in the sense of hypothesis was that he was living through a period of time in which the working-class specifically the industrial working class would take over the leadership and domination of society from the bourgeoisie now one of the problems with this model of course is that it is fundamentally kind of static in the sense that you know the government of Rome or we can even say the government of the Roman Empire doesn't really change that much from one revolution to the next Li don't forget revolution was not a force invented by by communists right you talk about revolutions in the history of Rome and some of those revolutions were brought by slave revolts a few some of them were brought about by one kind of middle-class fighting against the aristocrats fight against the patricians of the upper bust that happened repeatedly in history from many other revolutions were just infighting within the elite one group of aristocrats but he gets another and so on but fundamentally the structure and nature of authority of the Roman Empire and of the city of Rome itself remains pretty much unchanged from one period emetics now this is actually something Carl Marx and and Hegel have in common what's the big example they both were living in the shadow of Napoleon right so what happened in France during the period of the French Revolution and then the directory or the Directorate you know kind of more corrupt less idealistic period the French Revolution and then that falls away and you have Napoleon taking over you have various stages of France kind of sort of having elected government after the Revolution and then kind of giving up on that illusion and Napoleon taking over and there's by the way is a series of revolutions within that French Revolutionary period it's not just one revolution and when you look at that history that again Hegel very much lived through and Karl Marx was obsessed with in retrospect but it was it was fresh retrospect it wasn't ancient history for Karl Marx what you see in the analysis of the French Revolution and breakdown in the French Revolution then napoleon taking over it's very much stage by stage that history can be summarized as class struggle as class warfare but again it's a very kind of static notion of what government is government has already existed under the kings of france before the first phase the french revolution if you like government is taken over and operated by a different group of people after one revolution and then you have a sequence of struggles where different regime very clearly backed by different social classes even within Paris fight and exterminate each other incredible brutality in a manner quite similar to what we have in the historical record definitely from ancient Rome so II mean it's not democratic in the sense of a vote and then government changing hands no not at all you have a period of time when the jacobins rise up and then the Liberals it's a liberal here meaning the moderate left the Liberals exterminate the jacobins hunt them down and kill them so they both the far left is suppressed by the Liberals and there's a very clear difference of social class between them who represents the poor and who represents the wealthy but liberal and then you have another period where again this is old French Revolution retirement here where the the Liberals are fighting against the real Royalists conservatives so those are people who are wealthy and are to some extent aristocrats or they're just conservative both the people who still liked the monarchy and wanted to go back more to that kind of system and again the exterminate other it's absolutely mmm is it says brutal as the revolutions in in ancient Rome on the streets of Paris the body counts are not that high compared to the 20th century it's not like Adolf Hitler mastering people on that scale it's a few thousand people dying here and a few thousand people dying there but its persecution that involves you know going to people's houses murdering civilians like dragging them out of their homes to be decapitated with the guillotine the brutality and the kind of face to face hands-on nature of that of that violence it casts a huge shadow over the city of Paris and city by city and the rest of France it's a patchwork in some cities extremely brutal violence some cities not so much some were spared that amount of violence when you get down to that that level so you have a sequence of revolutions in France none of them sincerely Democratic none of them producing or ruled by are guided by elections elections play a background role in in the French Revolution but you know Assyrians are interested to finish the sequence what's really the final stage of radicalism in the French village the last gasp of the left-wing as you go through this series of back and forth class antagonisms class struggles the last phase is what's called the society of equals also referred to in English as the conspiracy of equals alright and today what most historians say is they were the first socialists in our sense of socialists and they were partly produced by the violence of already mentioned like well the Jacobins had already been exterminated and suppressed and the sequence of back and forth suppressions persecutions of the Conservatives and the far left by the the moderate liberals in the middle but it's impossible to call the moderates because they were murderous power Mars and what's produced by this is a genuinely new form of radicalism that says that they reject you know the existence of the aristocracy but they also reject the rule of these middle-class bourgeois liberals that their objective is to replace that with a society of equals okay so organically and authentically within the context of the French Revolution Karl Marx found this inspiring symbolic touchstone that in many ways she just appropriated and germanized and formalized and presented as his own philosophy and he presented it not just as an analysis of the past but as his projections for the future as what he saw coming in the future and of course that's a ridiculous methodology right I can't I can't present you with my analysis of what happened during the Great Depression of say World War one Great Depression will do and then say ok and now here's what I'm seeing this is what's gonna happen in the next 50 years it's just a glance if anything you can say well that won't and again because that already happened once history is not gonna repeat itself but you know obviously Marx found that tremendously inspirational and and that is if you like the underlying sentimentality beneath some of the seemingly Hegelian jargon about social class and throat Marx's work he's obsessing over the French Revolution and as he's already well known as we mention on this channel his analysis of Louie Napoleon this is normally called Napoleon the third Louie Napoleon who's not the original Napoleon you know his analysis of that is constantly presenting parallelisms claiming that history is repeating itself that there was the French Revolution before and then there's this other French Revolution there was a Napoleon Bonaparte before we have another guy who's kind of sort of like Napoleon Bonaparte now you know he does that partly just as a provocative literary device but partly that just really is the way he sees history and politics and again I mean if you don't if you don't take it too seriously kind of so what I mean you can just look at this guy Marx and say well you know what Karl Marx was not an expert in the history of China he's not an expert in the history of India he wasn't an expert in the history of France he wasn't expert in the history of Rome or Greece or anything else he was definitely not an expert on the science of economics he dabbled in all these things he got books off the leverage of he read very widely and I have to give him credit for that he continued to be inspired by by new ideas and he came up with this kind of air SAS political philosophy that some people found inspirational and took way too seriously where people pretended that his analysis was a large part analysis the French Revolution really did reveal something about the mechanics of history that a predictive power for the next revolution and you know long story short what he said was during the French Revolution before the first French Revolution oh the one that ends with Napoleon the problem was he felt the industrial working class hadn't developed yet such that this poorer class could really take over the government the problem was the French Revolution moved forward and forward you have the emergence of as I say socialism under the conspiracy of equals but ultimately that was a period where the bourgeois class still dominated society where counter-revolution they couldn't get past counter-revolution both of the bourgeois liberals and of course also ultimately Frances dragged back to monarchy of one kind after another that France regresses after the Revolution brought them closer and closer to this progress so you know this ends up being a kind of flattering video I'm completely anti-marxist don't get me wrong but the sense in which I can sympathize with Karl Marx's intellectual direction here is precisely that I see it didn't evolve out of Hegel it's really a bad way to teach Marx and as presented is evolving it of Hegel it evolved out of an analysis of the French Revolution and again very much in the shadow of Europe's obsession with Greece in Rome and Marx was correct that democracy and voting and Parliament's don't really explain very well what happened the sequence of events in the French Revolution instead tragically you have a kind of phony farce of these elections and by the way in most of those elections the liberal so-called Democrats from whatever the Liberals who are controlling the government they would allow far fewer than 10% of people to vote they basically only allowed people to vote who supported their government and they were carrying out violent brutal suppression of anyone who disagreed with them so there was some voting but it's really tragic I mean it really really was a kind of dictatorship you know with a with a fig leaf of symbolic democracy that's what the French Revolution degenerated into and again they didn't just persecute the right in the royalist and conservative they were also persecuting the left very very brutally these these ports were liberals so you know the sense in which I can sympathize with Marx is he was obsessed with the issue the French Revolution and he was broadly speaking correct that when you look at that history what you were looking at is a history of class struggle a history of class warfare a history of one social class after another trying to exterminate the other at least just within Paris on a kind of small local scale struggling to physically take over the government and within that short timespan the nature of government itself as I say remains static it's still if you like the king's throne and it's just a question of who's gonna sit on that throne in the same way that within one period of time in the Roman Empire you can see you know one social class throwing its to another for who's gonna who's gonna control the throne and we're not really looking at profound reforms to to government itself so I think with that summary you can also guess the way in which I profoundly disagree with Marx's whole direction what you really need to examine in the history of Rome and in history of France is the way in which the throne itself changes the meaning of government changes the meaning of the military changes you know like these things actually do transform during the lifetime of Napoleon during the lifetime of of Hegel also the way you know actually you need to give a very simple example at the beginning of that period of time military service is associated with punishment for a crime people are recruited you know by brute force and force in the military service and you know they're offered military service instead of a death sentence this kind of thing they're regarded as the dregs of society and the higher orders of the military are all established by birth by being an aristocrat and so on and by the end of that time say by the time Napoleon dies the idea of the military being an elite form of upward social mobility where promotion is based on merit not based on aristocratic rank or birth that that if it's a citizens duty to serve the country through the military again ideas that are now with us today the transformation of from a kind of dark ages idea of the military into a modern idea of the professional military attached to ideas of nationalism and yet democracy ultimately it's a kind of more democratic ideal of military service so yeah you have the seen the same vocabulary is being used for the army but what is meant by those terms has profoundly changed and in the same way I mean it doesn't happen overnight but in that period of time the nature of government the nature of public service itself the responsibilities of the government the functions of the government they're completely transformed within say 50 years step-by-step gradually and much of it unplanned and unintentional but you know someone who lived through those 50 years they would be able to say you know what we mean by government before the French Revolution is profoundly utterly different from what government does now how it functions and so on some decades after the French Revolution had wound down after the atrocities had so-to-speak been been forgotten so you know yes the elements of class struggle came and went but if you think about government as a public service bureaucracy it was completely transformed often unintentionally if you think of government as being democratic at least partly at least imperfectly at least in principle than for the whole world including even like England England which was a an enemy of France then in exactly that period of time the fundamental assumptions about elections and the role of government they changed for everyone and and by the way of course that's not just because of France the rise and fall of the French Revolution also there's this little country you might have heard of called the United States of America so that also becomes a symbol of what Democratic electoral government you know could be so Marx is looking at that history and very fundamentally he is drawing the conclusions and is there a meaningful connection to the kind of aimless meandering self-indulgent reflections of Hegel in Hegel's philosophy of history not one that's worth talking about