The Oppression of the Poor: the Marxists are Wrong.

we tend to approach political problems
as pre-fabricated slabs of information given to us by already existing political organizations parties and traditions it's interesting how that narrows down the human mind where you can't even think clearly about something as obvious of the fact that every day you walk past drug addicts on the street that probably the single question you need to resolve most of all to improve quality of life in los angeles or vancouver is the drug drug addiction epidemic that problem and what we might need to do to solve it that really might be much more revolutionary than we'd like to admit to ourselves what we're living through right now in 2020 is sort of the bizarre victory of marxism in that marxism completely transformed the way people think about um the organization of society and inequality and in my opinion sincerely marx himself was wrong and more broadly marxism created popular misconceptions about society that are wrong so you know you're talking about the relationship between the upper class well let's just simplify the extremely rich and the extremely poor i talk to people all the time university-educated people who have the delusion that our government today has a parasitic relationship to the poorest of the poor that the government like in the united states canada western europe the government gets rich by oppressing and exploiting the poorest of the poor now mathematically this is completely false mathematically the government exists the government is rich today because it exploits the richest of the rich the taxes that build the roads that you know make trains run on the train tracks that provide you with electricity and running water and schools all of the things the government does those are paid for by rich people now once you understand that many other aspects of 21st century and neoliberal governments start to make sense like the way in which many first world countries are competing to try to attract and retain wealthy people as residents because multi-millionaires they could go and live in barbados they could go live in the turks and caicos islands they could go live in the mediterranean italy they can choose to live anywhere in the world so for the the government of canada to try to compete and say no no no we want you to have your primary home here in canada we want you to pay taxes here in canada this is you know it's surreal but this is the reality of governance in the 21st century that the the parasitic or exploitative relationship is in fact between government and the richest of the rich [Music] and the poorest of the poor not only does government not thrive on oppressing them they're a net loss for government government is taxing the rich and then genuinely uh redistributing that money to the poor providing benefits like health care education and just money uh to poor people and all these in all these ways so as simple as that sounds that's already a huge hurdle to get over in 2020 now where does that vaguely marxist delusion comes from it comes from what karl marx and engels had to say about the french revolution basically you know the image we get of the french revolution uh again sort of a mainstream uh marxist frankly but you know mainstream uh retelling of the fable of the french revolution was that the king and the aristocrats were rich because they exploited the poor like the as if the poverty of the poor created the riches of the ruling class and that therefore this sets up the marxist fable of communist revolution therefore the way to progress was for the poor to rise up and tear down the aristocrats and presumably distribute these these ridges among themselves so presenting the aristocrats as a parasitic social class as if they accomplish nothing as if their money comes from looting and pillaging uh the poor which is again it's just kind of mathematically untrue i mean like really think about that so there's a man in a castle who has a bunch of horses and he goes down into a village and steals from the poor people that's how he gets rich really are you sure about that you know the reality of what was going on in the whole century leading up to the french revolution is that aristocrats were the people opening factories aristocrats were the people pushing forward scientific progress including at that time the inventions of the first computers no i did not misspeak and yes i've seen these these devices in museums i haven't just read about them in books computers reckoning machines as they're often called that were made on having metal cylinders that would spin and click into place to compute large sums that included the government computing taxes by the way how much money you can imagine you get to numbers in the millions it's very difficult to do that math on paper so the development of reckoning machines and you can the history of any one of these machines it's always going to be the baron of a certain place or the vi count there are all these people with aristocratic titles who came together and put their money together and employed a scientist and employed some craftsmen and metal workers to make this computer breakthroughs in the sciences breakthroughs in industry you know really positive progress was being accomplished by aristocrats and again if you even just read philosophy from this time many of the philosophers who are complaining that the poor are oppressed and downtrodden are themselves aristocrats they're aristocrats who are you know put it this way to say that the aristocrats were human beings like you and i it's really an understatement because in their society they were the only people who had an education equivalent to what you and i may take for granted and large parts of society were illiterate were incapable of doing math we're incapable of knowing things that again today we we presume even the poorest of the poor will know we start with this notion of aristocrats that really does come from karl marx and engels writing their assessment of what happened in french society and then to some extent they don't do a very good job of trying to transpose this pattern onto german and british society but they have their fable of what happened with the french revolution and then amazingly because marxism is a failed ideology in some ways the triumph marxism is that it's kind of hypnotized our whole culture into thinking this way about about social class uh to this day and um you know even people who are rich themselves i've found this so many times it's very strange what a kind of self-hatred they have um that they feel they have to apologize for being a bank manager and so on that they can't see something heroic or positive or noble in being born rich and having those advantages and doing something positive with them saying hey i have extraordinary opportunities you know and it may be unfair that i've got them but hey just step back and now look what i can do with it if you if you give me a chance you know that instead you have this kind of very strange self-hating deceptive concealing ruling class you have a class of millionaires who want to pretend they're middle class basically so that they can shirk the responsibilities of being aristocrats and they may indeed be uh be the aristocrats of our time i don't know if you have more you want to say on this but i got i got completely non-french revolution related questions so i'm happy i'm about to move on to your next question i think the other the other thing is to really try to be honest with yourself about what it is you want in politics um what is trying to achieve and what it is you're complaining about or what it is you're against and it's it's very easy to sign up for the political program presented to you by a a party or a faction whether it's left wing or right wing and not to go through those not to go through those steps what is wrong with life in los angeles california to take an example i think anyone who's really really honest with themselves would have to admit that you know drug addiction is one of the largest problems in los angeles perhaps you feel this way about vancouver perhaps not and that the nature of the problem and the nature of the solution it doesn't fit into any of these simple ideological categories like it's not you know the problem with drug addiction isn't that the working class is being oppressed by the aristocrats or that it's it's also not giant corporations or this kind of stereotype discourse like there are a lot of hackneyed political discourses um and also of course i don't believe some kind of right-wing fable that the reason why people are drug addicts is because they've turned away from jesus or you know lost their faith in god or something if you're just really being honest with yourself about what is the problem like maybe part of my problem is i have a daughter and my daughter can't play in the park because there are drug addicts there you know lying out sometimes literally dying we had a dead body in our park a couple a couple weeks ago guy died of a drug overdose right in front of us obviously this is only one example but it's so obvious and we seem to be so incapable of dealing with it i think because we tend to approach political problems as pre-fabricated slabs of information given to us by already existing political organizations parties and traditions it's interesting how that narrows down the human mind where you can't even think clearly about something as obvious of the fact that every day you walk past drug addicts on the street that probably the single question you need to resolve most of all to improve quality of life in los angeles or vancouver is is the drug drug addiction epidemic that problem and what we might need to do to solve it that really might be much more revolutionary than we'd like to admit to ourselves i know what to do but there's a difference between knowing what to do and being desperate enough to actually do it and it's very painful to be that desperate