Karl Marx Life and Philosophy

Hallmark's born 1818 live till 1883 whatever says in your program is always right 1883 what's important to note like Nietzsche factoid with all the philosophers who dealt the particularly Nietzsche and Marx they were born into the Europe that followed Napoleon now and I mentioned before that Napoleon did is basically blow Europe up the forces were at work changing the political and social structure of Europe Napoleon sort of accelerated those and sort of just blew up the old system he didn't make anything new the people who made something new were three important I mean a lot more than three people of course but three people in particular which were a Talleyrand medtronic and Castle raw we're all foreign ministers of one sort or another and they negotiated a true a european-wide treaty that held depending on how you want to score for you between 75 and 105 years of peace in main sections of Europe which was really historically an astonishing achievement it's one of the great achievements in foreign policy because they negotiated a treaty that held as far as large-scale warfare goes nearly a hundred years of peace after a couple of hundred years where they hadn't had ten years of peace um so but what the one way they did this is they created a whole series of interlocking weak governments and so while there was continent-wide relative peace in any given region there was political instability you had all of these forces that we're working one against the other to try and become more conservative more liberal to to bring back the monarchy no no let's bring back a radical republican government no no let's do some sort of communal system early socialist movements and so you have the strange combination of peace in a military sense and a fair degree of stability on a large scale but if you were in what became Germany if you were in what is France today if you were in Italy even if you were in England it was a time of very great political instability a really surprising amount of political Fermin and this is what Marx grows up in he grows up in a period of remarkable social mobility intellectual change in flux and and political question part of what's driving this is what he ended up being a specialist and of course is economics a huge changes of foot we're going to talk about that but just a little bit on his background a most important thing to understand about Marx is he was educated in jurisprudence in law basically but was never really all that interested in law he was interested pretty much from very early on in what was going on he kept saying the purpose of philosophy is not to explain the world but to change the world that's what you want to do have to have some ideas some concepts that will change the world and the first thing he got involved in both in Germany well with modern-day Germany and in Paris he by the way I'm not going to try to track this out for you but Marx got thrown out of Paris on four separate occasions around France um so you get thrown out they would change government they'd invite him back he'd get thrown out they'd change government they'd invite him back he'd get thrown out yeah he did that for time they would go Germany and France bond Belgium France Paris Belgium England Paris Germany so it really is complicated but he was doing the same stuff all the time wherever he was he was either on a newspaper editing a newspaper or writing some version of the newspaper and he is a generally remarked as the first going to do on-the-spot reporting which is to say if there was some big uprising happening he would go there and say I went to the corner this and that and there were 500 people in the street throwing rocks at the police and the police weren't doing anything and these people were doing this and they were doing that it was mostly the poor that were out in the middle class stayed in their shops and this represents this kind of problem thus notion that if you want a report about something you should just go there look at it and write it down um with with a particular political tinge always a particular political tinge he was what we would call today a social progressive he really thought that people deserved a fair shake and at times this would be very popular with the local governments hence parish would invite him back so he'd be embarrassed for a while when they change governments and they'd go no no no censor everything and kick him out of the country I had this happened over and over for but from his earliest days he was focused very sharply on the actual conditions of people not in an abstract sense and this is his big beef with Hegel he came under the sort of sway of a disciple of Hegel known as power back and his thesis on far back is important because it's when he says Hegel is all wrong and what he says is wrong with Hegel is it hegel hegel is an idealist and what he does is he focuses on the abstract if you're an idealist you say somewhere out there there's a perfect world a perfect idea a perfect law of moral code and then we compare ourselves to that that's that's the definition sort of a sketch of definition of an idealist and what Hegel argued is that there are these forces in history these concepts these ideas that evolve through a dialectical process where you have a thesis whatever the Western concept of man then you get an antithesis of that a response to that which is to say an ideal noble person chivalry and then the synthesis of those two ideas produce the next thing which is itself then becomes a sist and so it goes thesis antithesis synthesis which is a new thesis and that history progresses by all of these ideal categories coming into conflicts with each other and producing new ideas and this is teleological which means it's directional it's going someplace and the place that's going is the end of history and the perfect man pretty soon a hundred years one hundred and fifty years we will live in a perfect world because every time we do a thesis antithesis synthesis we end up in a better thesis and then that one goes and we get a better one and a better one then pretty soon we will be in a world that has the perfect government and is inhabited by perfect man of which Havel called the end of history which means there's no more dialectical progress because all the problems have been worked out and the last man which means not not there's only one person but that the people who are lack are the perfect realization of human possibility Marx said this was crap utter and complete nonsense Marx is like what the hell are you talking about there's an idea in the world as no ideas in the world there aren't concepts in the world he says what's in the world is the world man is in the world you want to know what's going on the world go look at the world look at the statistics talk to people see what they say how are they living what are they doing what are the facts on the ground that's why he's a materialist he's absolute that's what Marx is always referred to as a materialist and a founder of what's called dialectical materialism he keeps Marx's idea of the dialectic thesis antithesis synthesis new thesis on you go but he said you don't it's not an ideal category it's actually lived by people in the world he also believed in the teleology of mark of Hegel he said we are going someplace in the place we're getting to is better so there's no use really complaining about what's going on even if it's bad what you want to do is understand where it's going and try and get there as fast as you can because there's no use fighting the tides of history because this is what's going to happen so this is all a sort of shorthand what his thesis on power back is eliminate and resist the notion of idealism by focusing on the here and now what's really going on in people's lives and then extrapolating back into the future so he keeps the structure of Hegel but tries to get rid of the idealism by replacing it with materialism so if you've ever heard the phrase dialectical materialism it means I just like half of Hegel I like the other half of Hegel that's really it really awesome asically what it means so he's out there and he's doing the newspaper he's getting kicked out of places and he's getting in trouble and have sort of the Congress manifesto and he's getting socialist ideas but it important to note that the socialists never really liked Marx that much because he's not an idealist because he really is all he always wants to talk about the facts of numbers he's he's a political economist with heavy heavy philosophical leanings if you really want to think about it um and eventually after lots of struggle he gets booted out he ends up and loaned it and and this is where most of his significant political writings take place either just before that period but mostly in the period where he's in London now he's a refugee his English is not so good originally although it gets very much better later in his life and he has no money or almost no money now what Marx does is he lives for the rest of his life this is about 1846 so he lives about under 40 years I'm supported he and his family supported about 95% by Engels Engels gives them all the money that they have for the rest of their lives to the point where Engels diminished his quality of living a great deal so he can support Marx's family Marx was not good with money he was good with money in the abstract there's not money in the concrete and so he's living in the diarist of poverty at this point drinking when they first moved there so much so that one of his children dies in the home probably because they could not afford medicine and they loved their children very much and so this was a devastating blow to them but they lived in very very severe poverty for years and years and years but what Marx did is he tried to organize people around his political ideas and he did lots and lots of research what I want to go through tonight is sort of the major steps of his research and then how to brought that all together into this argument of that we kind of become known as dialectical materialism or sort of early communism he really wasn't a communist we'll talk about why that is and then sort of because you know where we are today a little bit of what this has to say about where we are today I'm so here he is he's in England he has no money none zero so much so that sometimes he couldn't leave the house because he had pawned his only pair of pants you know you're poor win this is officially aside if you're wondering um but when he did have pants he spent hours and hours and hours at the British Museum doing research and what he was doing research on was economic statistics and social history again how did people really live how did they live in 1700 how they live in 1800 how they live now how many people were employed what were they paid wages add up to what was the cost of living he did just a massive amount of research and what this ended up to he came up with a couple of theories first he came up with this is not original to him but if the philosophical foundations is the notion that property is theft right he gets this in part from Adam Smith and the idea is we live in a perfect example of this right because we come in our ancestors arrived in America and they look here's a continent and nobody lives here so the land must be ours for free and some people who lived here said oh excuse me and we shot them um and then the land was ours for free right and he said this is necessary this is how it always is to convert property land into private property there is a moment when people who are sharing the land or using the land have to be gotten rid of and the people who gain access to the land then have to be protected by your governmental system now this isn't us just capitalism this is you he says this is necessarily so my neighbor used to always say I'm not so upset that we stole the land from the Indians but since we didn't pay them for it why do I have to pay a mortgage but I don't want to get screwed and they're getting screwed well who's making the money right somebody is making a good deal here and what Marx argues and I think is pretty convincing is that this is a it causes political calmness where this phrase comes from that your economy is always political it has to be when the government steps in whatever way and says you get the land and you don't and we're going to protect it under these rules there's your politics and the structure of your economy as based on property so he tracks out various ways you can organize property under various systems of political economy this is remember it's always theft originally no one owned the land now somebody does and how that transition takes place is always ugly and messy so when you talk about economy and economic structures remember you're always talking about some version of politics and political thinking and when you're talking about politics you're always talking about economics at some level second idea he comes up with I'll give you these are not in order but we'll put them all together make his big thesis this is called the labor theory of value and this is the idea of why is something worth something why am i able to charge money both as if we have this podium right various podium somebody at some point paid money for this podium where did that value come from now as people try to say its use value Marx said no this this is silly it's not useful because you can use things without paying for them and you have things that are useless that you're willing to pay for and he gives long explanations for this and his argument is look what you end up paying for is congealed labor you have raw materials and then you have the labor that took to put the raw materials in some form that somebody else would buy and so he said the value of objects is just accumulated labor and if you get a lot of labor that's cheap then the price of things will decline China and what you'll end up with is a general reduction in the price of things not because the things are worth less but because the labor that went into them comes less again we've just experienced a huge example of that over the last 15 years so things have gotten cheaper why because also we have this vast pool of cheap labor to produce them so the value of something is in fact the accumulation of labor in that object obviously this isn't perfectly true but but this was this was his argument it's a good general outline but he says where does that value come from them well it comes from the work that someone puts into it so value is actually someone's labor alienated from them objectified outside of them and more importantly somebody made a profit on this right someone sold this imported it made it and they made a profit all that money is the alienation of more labour value that somebody put into something then they got back if the value of something is the labour that's put into it and I get to keep 10% off the top I've stolen according to mark 10% of the labor value that went into it I'm accumulating as a capitalist what I'm doing is I'm accumulating the work of other people I'm not doing the work I'm taking it from them and then what I do this is the beautiful part is I pay them for their work with money marks the love of money money is great he says you you I pay you or the idea I'll pay you for your work so now you get back your labor alienated from you in the form of cash it's not your labor anymore it's been turned to abstract and you're getting less than you put in if you didn't get less than you put in what happened to me as a businessperson I'd go bankrupt so I'm necessarily ripping you off I have no choice the system is set up to rip you off you do more work than you get compensated for your work is alienated from you and then a portion of that is returned to you in an abstract form in cash this is a bad system marginally this is not at what the hell are we doing this is no good and he says what happens when you do this you said well look around this is back to his newspaper days go and see where the laborers work the proletariat laboring in the cities live in houses without fresh air or sunlight he says fresh air and sunlight the natural gifts of mankind have become unnecessary they're no longer there become a luxury item you don't need them to survive this is man is not an animal who survives but even fresh air and sunshine has become a luxury that you have to pay for we can charge you for everything they said so this does not improve the quality of man's life it decreases it now along these lines another aspect of this is he said look not only as a cap was trying to make a profit this is if you wanna know what's going on today you have to understand this and this is what I call this is ten minutes and you have an Indiana you're not going to all get a Masters of Business Administration so you must understand businesses and Marx again as far as I know is one who work this out in detail the businesses and companies are not trying to make a profit this is a common misunderstanding of capitalism they're not interested in making a profit in fact they're legally if you were a publicly traded company you are legally precluded from trying to make a profit you're not allowed to do that honestly I'm not making this up what you have to try to do is a CEO buy ball is make as much profit as you possibly can maximize your profit at every moment and Mark said this is inevitable let me give you an example of this awful if I give you the numbers let's say you have two businesses we invest a million dollars this is a business B these invest 1 million dollars at the beginning of the year at the end of the year business AAA has a million dollars plus one hundred thousand dollars business B has a million dollars plus two hundred thousand dollars how much money did business a make no they lost one hundred thousand dollars this is we must understand you go to bed graduate school is the first thing they teach far as I know it's only teeny teeny it's only a little tiny joke what you did is you lost one hundred thousand dollars this is called opportunity cause you have the opportunity to make two hundred thousand dollars and you didn't therefore you lost a hundred thousand dollars and opportunity costs you're a bad business person you must change your investment strategy right now Boeing is laying off workers why opportunity cost anybody how much they made last year 2.7 billion dollars profit 2.7 billion they're laying off workers over the last 10 years boeing has made over a hundred billion dollars in profits they are laying off workers why because they should have made more they are not interested in making 2.7 billion dollars it seems like a lot you think wow a couple of billion dollars aren't you happy no we're not happy we must lay off workers because we should have made more than that we should have made 3 billion or 5 billion or 9 billion somebody out there made more therefore we lost money to effects of this the capitalist is driven to maximize the amount of labour knows we have the labor theory of value to maximize the amount of labour squeezed out of any given industry because if I pay my workers a little more than my competitor even if I make a profit I've lost money this is right I hear this confusion all the time you watch some news with this they say well you know they make money and that you know they're fighting this raising wages or this insurance bill or anything like that yes they always will not because they're afraid of losing money it's because they're any kind of increase in cost simply means they are not maximizing the kind of money they could have meant so if if you don't maximize that profit there's a couple of turf right here if you don't maximize that profit here's the other thing that happens if my business returns 10% and your business returns 20% which business are people going to want to invest in 20% you see we know how capitalism works why invest with us for he runs a Crabby business you see we're all capitalist now it's beautiful we know that we want to invest with the guy that's getting 20% returns and you know what this is exactly what happens everybody invests with this guy this guy cannot get investors he goes out of business and then this guy gets all this versus client and gets bigger the second thing this means besides the fact that they're driven to continuously strive to squeeze every possible last ounce of labour value out of the workers is monopoly we must form a monopoly because if we compete against each other let's say we both made 150 thousand dollars last year we go why don't we gotta increase our profits what we advertise that cost money if we cut our sales price that cost money if we reduce the quality you might lose some customers ah you collude it does not take business people very long to figure this out you collude with your competitors you form combines you you form a monopoly if you have a monopoly think oil you can charge what the hell ever you want or a lot diamonds it's Valentine's Day hopefully you all get lovely diamonds from the people who love you diamonds are by the way nearly worthless they're also a monopoly it turns out you can take something that is nearly worthless monopolize it and make a lot of money off of it it's great so if you buy a diamond for a thousand dollars you've probably only paid nine hundred and seventy five dollars more than it's worth but you can't get access to the diamonds because of the DeBeers and a few other companies have totally monopolized the world market that way they make lots of money you can also go to the Henry's hardware and get a diamond bit saw diamonds are not expensive but they were II would put them on sub Lakes right and so they're driven to do things like monopolize the oil market monopolize a diamond market na peláez the aerospace industry how many companies do we have that manufacture commercial airlines in the world airplanes do and you know what they're both hugely profitable or if they get a little less than usually profitable they just lay a bunch of people off by the way Boeing and Airbus the European consortium has Airbus has decided to cooperate because of course why compete it makes so much more sense to work together and share components and engine development and all that eventually we'll have one company and then that company will really make money so you have this system where monopolies and pressures are absolute and the drive to extract every last value of labour out of people is absolutely that's why I get value I squeeze people and so Marx combine these two things and he said all right here's what's happening you have the working proletariat companies get bigger they hire more people but they squeeze them harder and then those companies combine and get bigger and hire more people but then squeeze them harder you can see where this is leading eventually you get so much power coordinated in so few people's hands and they're squeezing so many people so hard those people will Ravel said this is a scientific fact so you have this growing class of proletariat workers who are being exploited more and more aggressively and you can track that out the records on this are very clear if you go back in England in particularly great records and you go back to the time of the Black Death about half the wealth say half thirty five percent of the working population dot and you know what wages for workers went right through the roof Wow there's no coincidence there and so then slowly the population built back up they started sheep farming which means you wanted people off the land because you wanted to put the sheep theory at the closure fights conversion of public property into private Holdings and the wages go down down down poverty goes up up up Ireland is a great case study of this oh then you start getting the factories people start coming into this cities they start pulling people into the cities this drives up a little bit labor in the countryside makes people unhappy but as English factories grow increasingly labor-intensive they need more people so you start bringing in kids right originally you don't want kids kids aren't great workers but it's better to pay kids a little bit when you need workers than it is to pay a dolt people a lot and once you put kids into the mix well now you've expanded your labor pool well then you start bringing women into the picture right so if half the population before it really wasn't able to work well now you expand it you let them work so you drive wages down even further a lot of countries had laws that did not allow women to work in factories and in the early 20th century this became sort of a women's rights issue well in the 19th century it was an employee union issue because if women could work it just drove wages down it was bad for women and men it was a way to protect families basically so Marx is talking all this out you see well what's going to happen you keep squeezing them and increasing the population of people who are getting squeezed and Exploited you squeeze them and exploit it and expand them the wealthy the capitalist class grows increasingly small but rich he said well this is just this is just going to explode how long can this go so you have the thesis which is capitalists private property and the advent of basically the manufacturing economy the antithesis which is the rise of the proletariat you can't have the capitalist manufacturing class without the working class they're necessarily they go together but one is the antithesis of the other and then the conflict between these two the synthesis Marx thought would be the overthrow capitalism and the destruction of that system what give rise to some form of socialism or connolly was very vague on what this actually ever gave rights to but he said that this crash is coming there is no doubt so that make sense so you've got the labor theory of value it all sounds not terribly unfamiliar right I mean he's not I think in a lot of ways he's just really right about a lot of this stuff his predictions about the future turned out to be a little wonky but the notion of this is exactly how capitalist work they have to maximize their return a labor theory of value turns out to be excellent a lot of ways it's not perfect because excellent lotteries he struggled with one little part though this turns out to be the key part he said what you also get with the capitalist class is you get a rise of what we would call the middle class they call it the burgeois z but what we call the middle class this is a class that doesn't necessarily own a lot of capital but it's clearly not the proletariat and he considered the the middle class of bridge resi to be essentially sort of a virus or a pariah class it just sort of that a virus on the on the life of the body politic they just sucked juice out and really didn't do anything at least capitalists were doing something they were investing in factories of building things and making machines and exporting and importing and that you could understand and the workers were working but what the hell are all these other people doing in insurance offices and stockbrokers even then nobody could figure out what they did right and marks had several names for these people and it goes all the way from the Hochberg was easy which were people who were clearly wealthy but didn't own anything didn't produce anything you didn't it really this sort of blue is mine then the other regular bourgeoisie which was sort of all the clerks and the assistant managers and the advisors that go along with business all the way down to what he called the Lupin proletariat which is a great name the Lupin proletariat and these are all the people like the pipe fitters they had technical skills they somehow worked in the system but they never really seemed to work in the factory right and they were sort of a little bit outside the system and so we tried to take all those people and say well they're just along for the ride they're unnecessary they're unimportant through thought that they're very important and very necessary which is how we get to where we are today but one more step between there says the final thing we have to understand all of this is money money money money money money this is the great thing about money is that as I say it answers all seasons right if you want to travel money can make you go if you want a book money can get it for you if you want food money can procure it for you if you want rest money can get that for you if you want activity money can get that it converts into everything and he says and so we get confused when we buy a car he uses horse as an example but car works for us if we buy a car we confuse the power the the the perhaps beauty the wonder nosov the car with our own power we think ah I have purchased it now the car is an extension of my power its speed is an extension of my speed there's a demonstration of my capacity to make my force felt in the world it realizes my ideas and in part it does that's the crazy thing but in part it doesn't because it's always external to me this is what money does it does things out there this is so we have this strange relationship with money we know we want it that does for everything as it mark says it makes the ugly woman beautiful it makes the valiant man himself it makes the the slow man fast that makes the social pariah much loved right I mean he just goes through the whole Vance tis true right money money answereth all fall seasons and he said so we become convinced that the getting of money is - getting of all good things and so this is what we become focused on now how do we get bunny he says now if we're not the proletariat just slaving away in a factory we says what we get money as we entice desire and other people I need to create a new a desire for something that I have to sell for you then if you buy what I have to sell I get money and you get the power that you think you derive from spending your money and so he says what money does is it does not solve needs or reduce problems it amplifies them it is a mechanism for increasing desires needs unhappiness and unrest this is money's function so if you've ever seen I put matter of beer commercials for this reason right semi naked woman with beer right now you desire something I can't sell you semi naked women because that's marginally illegal I can't do that on TV at least but I can sell you a beer and so I entice your desire and then offer you something that theoretically will fulfill although we all know this is not going to work and yet somehow it works people buy all this beer or whatever it is why do we have all these variety of cars why don't we just have a couple of basic cards that get people around a small car for small families big cards for big families trucks for people who need trucks in them that's you're done Matt three cars maybe for a choice yes we want choice we can exercise our power in the world by being allowed to choose amongst all these things whether I need them or not has no bearing marks is also one of the first philosophers to point out quite categorically he says look this we also get very confused on this since people always want to talk about needs and desires you need these things you desire these things he's like no no difference his phrase is a needs whether they come from the imagination or the stomach or the same a person needs a $400 pair of shoes the same way another person needs food he says to not recognize this is to make a moral judgment he says it is morally much better for someone to get food than for someone to get a totally worthless consume right but the need is the same and he says when you try to like separate out what what means need and what means just a hopeless desire to just get lost he says you can't track that out particularly in a society even his time in our society of course we're way past that where any competitor real need is so easily met that you know what do we need to need some shelter we need some food then we need some people who like us ok great we solve that problem right if you're living on the street are going hungry in America it's usually a social dislocation there's not a lack of resources because our country is just super abundant with resources and so he says look that's what we have to understand that we generate these needs and other people our whole society or whole consumer economy is based on this and this is where Marx went wrong and this is how we got to today but he said this can only last a little bit I mean how much of your economy can be made up of things that people don't really need and they buy discretionarily it turns out at least 70% of it this is where we are today Oh Brad now maybe not sustainable but for a long time you can at least have an economy that runs on 70% Kirk krack and he says he never predicted this rate went completely wrong he's like you know you got two or three percent and it's all gonna blow up but why were we able to get to this level okay and here's what Marx really I think goes wrong so far everything seems good what's been happening to the middle class over the last hundred years it keeps growing it keeps expanding Marx thought that the proletariat would keep expanding it didn't expand it for a long time until all the people from agriculture had been sucked up but you have to remember that in his age in 1840s you're talking about economies that have 60 70 percent agriculture England was very manufacturing dense about 50% anybody know only people work in agriculture today in the United States it is less than 2% the Census Department can't track it anymore it's up to because they can't track any industry that has less than 2% so they always say it's less than 2 we don't know how much less so even if we take 2 percent so 98% is not an agriculture and has no non manufacturing jobs have just been like this you've got a chart from 1950 to today manufacturing jobs are just on a straight down help Marx talks that when this happened you'd have unemployment which would leave the civil unrest which would lead to revolution through the people would get squeezed so hard to extract all their excess capital and they would rebel or there'd be some financial dislocation they'd all get laid off and then Rebell both these things happened in small ways in Marx's lifetime and went AHA see look the Paris revolution people are all laid off the economy's up you know out of whack people are rebelling the overthrow their government see but he did not predict is the degree to which we love crap alright the degree to which we are more than happy to get money and it turns out that if you promise people money or the opportunity to make some more money in the future they love your account doesn't matter what your economy is by the way you just tell people like yes you're not rich now but next year you can be a little richer the year after that a little richer your kids'll be a little richer everybody's happy the day you tell them that all your kids are calling would be less rich than you are everybody is unhappy and he did not this rule again he did not predict this and so we're in this interesting situation were not worldwide but the United States and what they call developed economies the proletariat that he talked about is not cease to exist but it's become a relatively small percentage of the economy but the rules of capitalism keep functioning exactly the same way so what he what's happened and he predicted this a little bit he said everybody who makes in the middle class wants to be a capitalist why did people buy all these super expensive homes with mortgages with nothing down and really super rates at the end of it because they thought that in two years they'll be able to sell it for even more why because more money is good if you watch news over last couple of years you heard over and over again oh don't put your money in this because it's only returning high percent if you put your money in real estate you'll return 15% or 20% or if it's late at night and your shouldn't be watching these programs 100% in five see this is the capitalist mindset though that's what you have to understand this is what Marx was basically the first person to track out and understand he says this is necessary if you have a million dollars to invest you don't $100 we want 200,000 if you make a hundred and somebody else makes 200 you think you're losing if you make 270 makes 500 do you think you're losing and so people respond to this we will all respond like capitalists he never predicted this he always thought capitalists would be a very small class and never occurred to them that you could grow it and grow it and grow it and have a whole society of people who respond in this way trying to maximize the return on their investment by the way if you've ever heard of the Chicago School of Economics this is their argument they say Marx was right about everything except for this notion he said don't everybody is going to act like a capitalist Mark said Oh only a very few people would ever willingly do this because the flip side of it is it how do you make money you make money by exploiting other people you take their labor value which we labor theory of value and you take it from them so if you sell me a house for a hundred thousand dollars and I sell it for two hundred thousand dollars a month later or a year later it seems like I probably ripped you off right we think of that as a good deal Marx was not so clear on that and he thought most people would be unwilling to do this he thought it was only a particular class of people who would happily exploit or take advantage of these situations which is because he lived when he did and doesn't live today and so he was in this transitional period agricultural workers were going away becoming the proletariat proletariat's growing exploitation of the workers is becoming absolutely mind-boggling intense some of the things that he charts out in documents is that they made um for instance they made a baby formula that was powdered milk and so that women could give it to their children in the morning they would just of course go into a coma more or less and lay there unmoving for the rest of the day they would go and work a 12-hour shift come home at night feed them another bottle because they've just worked a 12-hour shift and then they pass out into a coma yeah and so they had children that literally lived for years on these mixes of formula because the women have to work he said this model is that everything becomes exploited from you becomes alien into you is your home your home no if you don't pay your rent what happens they kick you out if you don't pay your mortgage what happens they kick you out he said even primitive man curled up in a cave have more ownership than modern working men notice that a feudal system of property ownership was inherited people didn't really pay for property in feudal systems in an aristocratic system property was awarded in an imperial system which is to say with a king the king has everything you just get to use it these are all different systems of property ownership he said in modern property ownership we're all alienated from our property because we can all lose it at any time as soon as we stop paying for it it's not ours our children how do we look at our children they're not to be loved and coddled and raised there now burdened we have to you know immobilize them as he said and he was by the way he was famous for loving his children and if you read the letters that his children wrote on his death several Judas totter said he was the best possible father though we grew up in some poverty you must remember that we were always happy because we always had marks he was the best possible father any daughters could ever had we had the best childhood regardless of how much money we had or did not have and I envy no person because of the joy we had in that family so when he's writing about the kind of things children's from somebody who loves children he's like look they're just being crushed they're being crushed in factories they're being crushed at home why because they've been alienated from the family they become resources or burdens how else can you view them they cost money to feed or you could put them to work and make something from them we're alienated from our homes because we have to pay for them it's not - I haven't inherited it I don't get to keep this as I stopped paying for it I lose it so we really needed from our own time what is your time worth remember time is money time is money right we know that equation they beat it into our head you could be doing something productive to make money and if you aren't you're on the short end of the investment scale let's face it you're wasting your time right he says this whole psychology this one thing is great about remark since he was tracked out the psychology very clearly he understood how this worked early he's one of the first people he said philosophically he said therefore what this ends up being is in any human society therefore it cannot last because we're human beings eventually our human potential and our human desire to live not like that to live on a lien a did to be ourselves to express ourselves to be free of the bonds of labor that is alienated from us not from work he says people love to work they just don't want their labor to be alienated from them he says that means the revolution is coming like I said he had no idea of the power of crap he really did I mean he just didn't see this that that we would be so easily suited he said religion was the opiate of the masses that's that many people common that's all because you didn't have TV it's Isis right there's this notion of what keeps us sedentary what keeps us from rising up um which brings us sort of in a way to today you may have noticed over the last few months people are getting a little restless about the economy why well a couple of reasons one of course is blowing up - because middle-class people are losing their jobs this is very uh this is very rare middle-class people aren't supposed to lose their jobs and they aren't supposed to lose them for a long time the societies never care when the poor lose their jobs it's historically who cares about the poor screw them so if the poor have an unemployment rate of 30% we all shrug who cares it's not in the newspaper this has happened repeatedly since the 1950s it almost never makes the news there's occasional riot people get unrest maybe there's a strike little bit of news nobody cares ah you start laying off middle-class people and you were breaking the deal the deal is I get money i buy crap you leave me alone I leave you alone everything's good if you take my money away you take away my capacity to express myself to make my power realized in the world this means my abstract sense of value has left what I'm left with is a capacity to have a concrete sense of value how do I make myself felt in the world really if I don't have money what am I left with I have to act I have to do something to make myself felt to really be in the world now I'm not alienating for myself I'm acting in the world as myself I'm not doing it for money cuz I'll have money I don't have a job and so if I go on strike maybe I go on strike to get my job back but notice this is different than working for a job if I march in Washington ah see that's different and everybody makes everybody a little nervous all right how many people do on the streets there's a thousand people okay about five thousand how about ten thousand about two million people there for the inauguration two million if two million people watch the inauguration let me tell you everybody noticed that and what they realized is two million people could go on the streets if the economy keeps going downhill this makes everybody nervous this has happened once before in history by the way in our history called the Great Depression where we had an economic downturn serious enough to cause significant political change you don't know if we're there yet you might be you might not we'll see but Roosevelt was very clear in this she said look either we get the economy going or going communist is it everybody accuses Roosevelt of being left-wing he kept saying I'm a conservative I'm the guy who doesn't want to become a communist he says if you have 30% unemployment it's not going to be too long before that people get pissed off and overthrow the government and something bad happens as far as he was concerned this is exactly what Marx said but what Marx never foresaw was Roosevelt and those kinds of policies that a government could step in and say hey this is so bad we've got to basically give money to people we've got to do stuff to make people's lives better or else they get up and overthrow us so this new complication of political economy that Marx really hadn't predicted that governments would actually respond to this sort of thing this was unheard of in Marx this time what you did in Prussia was you got off to Calvary and they rode down on the people who are in the street and if people in the streets had enough rocks and guns well then they'd kill them all the people on the Calvary liberal government conservative government depends on who won the battle in the street and say until the notion that you might be able to avoid those two extremes through some sort of strange policy change really this Roosevelt's back and he kind of won that at least he's wanted for a while we'll see how long this pet keeps going and so we're this very interesting times many components of which Marx had predicted some of which he hadn't the capitalist desire for monopoly and maximization of profits he had axel oohed Lee right there is no question about this people keep saying why did our banks fail why did my bank or somebody else's bank or Citibank with all these smart people loan out on these horrible loans Jeff Green because let me tell you you're City Bank and you're making safe loans and getting 7% of your back and some other Bank is making crazy loans and getting 20% of your back who's smart and who's done the person making 7% is dumb and those people would all be fired and then these people over here would buy that bank and they just make the bad loans anymore so the it's a system that requires absolutely requires you to do crazy stuff like what's just happened the only way to avoid it is what Adam Smith said Adam Smith and Marx quotes him on this he said to business and only ever meet together to collude to fixed prices cheap customers or avoid government regulation but that's what he said and Adams you should know these Ida Smith is often trumpeted as the great free-market mind no no Alice Smith was like look you can have a free market but it's got to be so draconian Lee regulated by the government that we wouldn't even recognize it today as free market but left to its own devices the forces that Marx talked about kick in and curiously which we're experiencing now at least a little bit is if people feel their economic situation declining and their exploitation and fear increasing they will rise up and overthrow whoever they perceive to be their masters that was his model that was his prediction it didn't work out like he said at all and of the proletariat didn't rise up right they just shrank away to nothing and yet that force still seems to be there it may be although we don't know if no way of knowing this we're going to run this experiment that if you piss the middle-class off enough they might do something historically they think they've been active that they really hate it when they lose stuff the poor people they never liked Russia it's so hard to get peasants to revolt you can do anything to a may never revolt this is why mark said the one country that will never go communist is Russia great connection because he said you know don't just you can't get there cuz are a bunch of peasants and peasants never rise up it turns out that you really really have to abuse your peasants to give them the rise up but the Czar's pulled it off Wow they refuse them so much that they actually loves up middle class turns out to be much touchier we don't take a lot of abuse we take a little bit and we get pissed off and we do stuff at least we'll see um so finally like I said according to Marx for this very interesting place because much of what he argued for is of course clearly still operating but this middle classes is he wasn't predicted and I really recommend if you're interested in this kind of thing of looking back at Roosevelt and his economic policies and what people were saying because what they were saying at the time was you have fascism and you have communism some people said we should go communist because communism is right the Marxist line some people said no we should go fascism because that's the conservative response to this left-wing don's and said is communism nobody was saying Oh sort of liberal democracy head your bets sneak through the middle people thought that was insane is that Roosevelt was doomed a few people did very very limited number is it maybe you can salvage something between those to extremes it maybe turn out that you can but not for very long and maybe that really at the end of May but we do have to go to either really repressive societies or one flavor or another depending on which direction want the repression to come from but we don't know yet finally I would suggest if you read the passages on alienation that are those are all from the economic and philosophical and you scripts by the way if you want to read one book by Marx and you probably only want to read one I strongly recommend that one because it's the notes and outlines that he took that more expanded dramatically and works like dust capital three loins and groove visa which was an even larger work that he had projected on this now Dells capital either early two volumes are excellent but they are filled with a huge amount of quantitative research so he says here's an argument and here's a hundred pages of examples proofs and logic to support that argument so he goes without hundred pages and you know and it cites statistics evidence quotations he have been very dense scholarly work so I don't want to criticize it in that sense but you get you can get the outline of the ideas from the very short work called the economic and philosophical scripts but where I think finally Marx really was right and where he continues to be right is on this question of alienation on this question of what does it mean to be a human being in a world that's mediated primarily behind money how do you operate in this and it's not going to Marx any idea how to get rid of it but if you read through there believe the whole sections in the manuscript she says look no pimp whatever is creative or innovative as a marketplace is and trying to first arouse your desires and meet them never in history has this been the case right think about think about the myriad commercials and enticements that we get repeatedly oh you need this you need that if you don't have that you're not a complete person if you're not oh you should have this you're too thin you're too fat you're too young you're too old you're hair is the wrong color your car is too small your car is too big your car uses too much gas or car should be a Hummer right it never ends there is no finishing place and so the psychology of how you escape from this world of alienation is riding on that I think today is still quite vibrant still still resonates some of the teleological stuff is gone the dialectical stuff sort of fell apart in the middle class but as analysis of the problem and the way money works particularly to exploit ourselves repeatedly I think ETA he was onto something there but it's not at all clear I would say what comes next it wasn't clear to him certainly oh man I don't think we're it's clear to us well yeah so I would say yeah Karl Marx 100 and some years later

Channel: Wes Cecil

Views: 261,834

Keywords: Karl Marx, Philosophy, Humane Arts, Lecture, Wes Cecil

Id: FosfvOdXrrw

Length: 61min 34sec (3694 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 03 2012